How to Increae Your Computer Storage Capacity

Those processor geniuses at Intel and AMD have doubled the processor speeds every couple of years, but hard drives have actually been increasing drive space exponentially since the end of the seventies.

In upgrading terms, SATA drives are recommended. While the actual performance of these drives may not surpass PATA drives, the future of their interface is far better-protected than PATA. Some current motherboards are using just a single PATA interface, reserved for optical drives. While the next generation of Intel-based boards will offer no PATA support whatsoever.

Upgrading to a new drive can have a dramatic effect on general system performance, it's best to relegate the existing system drive to a storage or backup role and use the new drive as the main system drive. It forces a fresh install of Windows and makes the most of the speed an up-to-date drive will offer. Google did some research into drive failures; it seems drives either fail early on in their lives or keep working for years, so eye that new drive with a little suspicion.

With drives themselves, the general reasoning is the higher the data density, the faster it will work, so large-capacity drives run faster than their smaller siblings. The only other way to increase speed is to make them spin faster or string drives together with RAID. Increasing rotational speed means manufacturers have to decrease the data density, so drives can physically read the data zipping by the read heads. Other than the expensive SCSI 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm drives, only Western Digital offers a 10,000rpm SATA range. The well-known and rather well-priced Raptor drives spin somewhat faster than standard 7,200rpm drives. Until recently, it seemed severely limited to 36GB and 74GB, but the maximum capacity has been increased to a far more usable 150GB. In practice, the Raptor produces some impressive results, out maneuvering the other drives in almost all respects. The extra-low seek time means it's very dexterous fetching files. In order to save cash, we know the Seagate drive offers 600GB of extra storage, so could be better for you.

Another option is to use integrated RAID, which is rather adept these days. As an example, we grabbed an old 300GB SATA drive and paired it up with the CinemaStar. Running on the MSI Intel board, the drives puts in startling read and write speeds at all levels, topping 100MBA read and 76MB/s write. The main weak point was random read but, even so, this matched that of the Raptor and in total the two drives cost less.