How to buy hard drive? Hard drives are currently available in 80GB, 160GB, 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, and 1TB(1000GB) capacities. The storage capacity of drive you buy depends on what you intend to do with it. The most common of these sizes is 250GB, which its capacity is more than enough for you to store your operating systems, applications, documents and several years of emails.

For those who often store or edit digital contents such as videos, musics and photos, a hard drive with higher capacity of 500GB or 1TB is needed, especially if you plan to keep your existing PC for a couple more years.

Please take note that if your desktop PC’s tower has more than two extra drive bays(space that hold your internal hard drives), you should consider buying two 500GB hard drives instead of a single 1TB hard drive. By this way, you can save some money because the price of two 500GB drive is definitely cheaper than a single 1TB premium model. I still prefer to use several smaller drives in your PCs, since even if the entire drive had blown up you would still have your other drives as backup. If you use a single massive drive instead, then you could have a disaster on your hands in the event of a major crash.

Most laptops have room for only one hard drive, so the above method is not applicable for laptop users. Instead, you should go for as much capacity as you can afford for your laptop and buy an external hard drive as a backup media just in case if your internal drive crashes.

For gaming users, if you don’t need too much space, I would suggest you to buy the current fastest hard drive for home users — Western Digital 10,000rpm WD Raptor drives. But this drive is available only in 36GB, 74GB, and 150GB capacities.

If you buy an external drive, it will likely cost a lot more than an internal drive. But an external hard drive has its own advantages. For more information about external hard drives, click here to read.

Network Attached-Storage (NAS) Devices have capacities range from 160GB to 1TB. Currently 1TB NAS device is considered affordable and is recommended since multiple users are likely to fill it relatively quickly. The prices of NAS devices mostly depend on what features they offer, for example some good NAS device offer backup settings, printer server settings and other settings that are well suited for business use, and of course they are far more expensive than a normal one.

Still having questions about buying a hard drive? Please read also:
- Internal, External or Network-Attached Storage?
- Choosing the most appropriate Rotational Speed.