What Is The Best Value Computer You Can Buy?: Part 3

First of all, I would like to apologise that I forgot about this series of posts I was going to do. But anyway, here is the third part in the series.

So, today I am going to talk about the best hard drive to buy. There are so many different capacities to buy and so many different choices in terms of speed and interface. For the sake of future proofing and getting the best speeds out of your hard drive, I would recommend getting a 7200rpm SATA II or III hard drive. This is pretty much standard now a days but there are a few cheaper hard drives which are 5400rpm in order to lower cost. In terms of capacity, the best way to look at it is cost per gigabyte as with modern desktops, you can usually fit four or so hard drives so the biggest priority is not getting the largest hard drive but the best value. This could mean that instead of buying a 2TB hard drive, you buy two 1TB hard drives. This will help give you as much capacity as you want for the lowest cost. Generally, the brand doesn’t matter too much. I personally like Seagate because of the 5 year warranty and I find them quieter than some other hard drives.

Below is a graph which compares the cost per gigabyte of different capacity hard drives. I have got all the prices from one store so although it is not necessarily the cheapest, it will give a more accurate comparison due to prices being more proportional. All the hard drives are Seagate brand with SATA II at 7200rpm.

As you can see from the graph, currently the best value hard drive is a 1TB one. Anything above that the cost per gigabyte starts to grow. However, although the cost per gigabyte value might be lower, the actual cost of the hard drive is more. So if you have a budget, try to get the best value hard drive you can rather than blowing it on something which, although better value, is something you are not going to use. If you want to have a 2TB hard drive, consider buying two 1TB hard drives instead. This is how you should go about looking at hard drives. As technology improves and capacities grow larger, prices of higher capacity hard drive will start to decrease and there will be a new sweet spot for hard drive prices.

On the next post I will cover the best value RAM you can buy.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.