Should You Replace or Add a Hard Drive
By Terry Stockdale for TerrysComputerTips.com
When does replacing a hard drive make more sense than simply adding more storage?–PC Pitstop.
Almost no matter what our initial thoughts were about an appropriate size for a hard drive, we tend to out-grow them. With today’s huge available hard drive sizes, as well as today’s programming practices, programs are becoming bigger and bigger as well as more bloated with “features” that no one uses.
Windows is getting bigger and bigger, too. Then, there are the audio files and video files that we record that swallow drive space in vast amounts (DVD-quality video takes 8 GB of drive space per hour of recording).
The basic question becomes “Do I replace my hard drive with a larger one, or just add another hard drive to increase my available storage?” My usual choice is to add another hard drive.
Prices have dropped dramatically on hard drives, especially in the last couple years. Not only are SSD’s becoming available as reasonable choices for home PC’s (at least for the boot drive), the advances in hard drive capacity have driven the prices of all but the highest capacity drives down to $100 or less, at least for Internet-order for bare drives(non-Retail — drive only, no software, cables, screws, adapters, etc).
This post is excerpted with the permission of Terry’s Computer Tips.
