Looking to upgrade my HDD.

[fcdwn777]

Hello everyone. I have recently built a new computer and am looking to upgrade my weakest link, which is my HDD. I am currently using the one that came with my Inspirion 530s. I know little about Hard Drives so my question is this. I can't afford an SSD, so for between 50-75 dollars what is a good HDD to get? I did ask a friend and he said I should find one with a 64 MB cache since I am running Windows 7 64 bit, does it reall matter if I use a 16, 32, or 64 mb cache hard drive? I am sure it does but I hope to gain some knowledge on the matter. Thanks in advance for your replies. If you need more info about my computer let me know, I am not sure what kind of things you need to know when talking about upgrading a HDD.

 

[HankB99]

Pretty much any 3 1/2 SATA drive should work. You may want to look into possibility of a BIOS upgrade if you go for a really big one as there could be limits there. You probably won't benefit from a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) drive but it should work at SATA 2 speed.

More drive cache will speed up reads, but you can also accomplish the same with more system RAM. The OS can use RAM for buffering drive I/O as it knows more about what it might need next.

Different folks like different brands of drives but WD seems to be pretty popular right now. (As well as Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi...) You may even be able to install the new drive side by side with your existing drive so you can either use both or use that to facilitate transfer of drive contents to the new drive.

 

[fcdwn777]

Pretty much any 3 1/2 SATA drive should work. You may want to look into possibility of a BIOS upgrade if you go for a really big one as there could be limits there. You probably won't benefit from a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) drive but it should work at SATA 2 speed.

More drive cache will speed up reads, but you can also accomplish the same with more system RAM. The OS can use RAM for buffering drive I/O as it knows more about what it might need next.

Different folks like different brands of drives but WD seems to be pretty popular right now. (As well as Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi...) You may even be able to install the new drive side by side with your existing drive so you can either use both or use that to facilitate transfer of drive contents to the new drive.

Well, I assume my Bios and Sata speed should be fine since I recently bought the mobo too. The only piece I am still using from the Inspirion is the HDD. Thanks for your advice.

 

[fcdwn777]

Best answer selected by fcdwn777.