When I first started writing for technology magazines way
back in 1994, the biggest hard drive that was commercially available was
a whopping 1GB in size. (That sounds small now, unless you consider
that, just three years earlier, the largest drive was just 100
Megabytes.) Twelve years later, the size has increased nearly a
hundredfold with the release of 400, 500, 750, and even 1,000GB (1,024
would make it a terabyte!) drives.
This month, we'll take a look
at a handful of some of the best drives--internal and
external--available for the Windows PC that will give you a
near-limitless storage capacity without breaking your budget.
Fishing For Barracuda
At a whopping 750GB,
Seagate's new
Barracuda 7200.10 is the company's fastest internal drive yet and their
first 3.5-inch drive built on perpendicular technology. (Perpendicular
technology is a method for increasing the drive's dependability and
capacity by storing information vertically rather than horizontally,
resulting in an increased data density and more gigabytes per platter.)
This drive can hold 13,000 hours of digital music, 190,000 digital
photos, 750 hours of digital video, or roughly 400 games. In other
words, unless you're producing Hollywood-quality movies or downloading
every MP3 known to man, it should be quite a while before you run out of
storage space.
The drive connects via Serial ATA (SATA) and boasts
an RPM of 7200, 16MB of cache, 300 Gs of non-operating shock resistance
and, at only 25 acoustic decibels, is whisper quiet.
The drive
operates with both 3GB and 1.5GB SATA as well as parallel ATA 100
connections and retails for about $600.
Diamond in the
Rough
Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 6H500F0 is
comparable in features and speed to Seagate's Barracuda, but ships with
500GB instead of 750. It also doesn't use the perpendicular technology.
So why would you choose this drive? Simply put: price. At around $320,
Maxtor's drive is about half the price of Seagate's but with two-thirds
the storage. You do the math. Gigabyte for gigabyte, you come out ahead
with the DiamondMax--but only if you don't need that extra 250GB of
space.
The DiamondMax uses SATA-300 and, like the Seagate, has a
16MB buffer, and though it seems to copy files slightly slower than the
Seagate drive, is comparable to the Barracuda in just about every other
respect. Note that Seagate has just completed acquisition of Maxtor as
of press time. Can the Seagate-Maxtor Diamond Barracuda 1,000 GB drive
be far away?
External Options
External hard
drives have one big advantage over their internal cousins: if you run
out of storage capacity, you can always add more. Moreover, you can
daisy chain them (if using a Firewire connection; USB 2.0 doesn't
support the option,) adding as many as 99 extra drives to the mix. Add
to that the fact that they usually come pre-formatted in the Fat32 file
system and adding a external drive to your system is a
no-brainer.
My favorite external drive thus far has been the 500GB
Seagate Pushbutton
Backup. If you're lazy about backing up your PC, the pushbutton backup
option makes things a breeze--simply install the included Bounceback
Express software, push the backup button on the drive, and before you
know it you've backed up your hard drive.
All external drives are
hot-swappable, meaning that you can connect and disconnect the drives
without turning off your computer, and most are connected to your PC via
Firewire, USB 2.0, or both. The Seagate drives are also stackable, which
means that, if you're short on space, you can stack them vertically as
high as you have room. The external Seagate is similar in stats to the
internal Seagate reviewed above, only with 8MB cache instead of sixteen,
and without the perpendicular storage technology. Street price is around
$380.
Go For the Silver
If you're willing to
pay a lot extra, WiebeTech's SilverSATA II
external drive might be the way to go. This drive holds an astounding
1,000GB of information, and boasts an 80x file copy speed and transfer
rates of up to 220Mbps. Connecting via USB 2.0 or external SATA-300
(which is faster than either Firewire 400 or 800) to a bay that can hold
as many as five of the drives, it's also one of the most versatile
external drives out there in terms of both interoperability and
transportability.
One surprise bonus: When using the dual bay
option, the unit has the ability to treat both drives as a single
volume. And through a hardware RAID (redundant array of independent
disks) the dual bay enclosure can mirror backups, meaning that if one
tray goes bad the other is on task to save your data.
So how much
does this baby cost? A whopping $1,300! At around $1.30 a Gigabyte, that
makes this the most expensive drive in this review. But if you want a
lot of storage and need the ability to add additional trays to your
external drive bay, as well as need lightning-fast performance and can
take advantage of the external SATA-300 schema, it might very well be
worth it.
Contributing Editor Joe DeRouen writes
Windows Advisor monthly for ComputerUser.
