How to buy hard drive? Before shopping for a hard drive, you must first know how would you use it and decide whether to go internal or external. An internal hard drive is housed within the computer itself, while an external hard drive is attached outside of a computer, requiring seperate housing, cooling system, and power supply.


Internal
You can add additional internal hard drives to your desktop PC if you have space to put it in your tower/casing, but not to your laptop because most of them have space for only one hard drive. Internal hard drives are appropriate for expanding or replacing the storage of your PC. If you want more storage space for your PC, you should consider adding additional drives to your PC depending on how many drive bays(spaces that hold disk drives) you have in your PC’s tower. If you wish to have a faster hard drive to run your operating system, you can replace your system’s primary C: drive with a newer and better one.


External
Detachable external drives, however, offer a lot of convenience. If your internal drive bays or connections are maxed out, an external drive is the right choice to add additional storage to your system, especially for users whose laptop provides space for only one hard drive. You can also connect them to any computer to watch, edit and share your videos or photos wherever you are. An external hard drive is housed in a hard drive enclosure with a cooling fan and a power supply if they are supported. So it can be safely placed anywhere you like if you use it as a backup media.


Network Attached-Storage Device
Network-attached storage (NAS) can be connected directly to a computer network to provide centralized data access and storage to heterogeneous network clients. It can also be placed in a relatively safe location. Using NAS is a simple way to add data storage to all your computers rather than just one. With NAS, multiple computers are able to access files anytime and do not rely on a host PC for file sharing. You can save money on your electric bill because a power hungry computer or server need not be on 24 hours a day to share files. Network Attached-Storage Device also provides a central place for backup storage.


Hard drives are all about capacity and speed, depending on your needs. If you need more information about hard drive’s rotational speed, capacity, buffer, interfaces or connections, please read also the following tips:
- Choosing the most appropriate Rotational Speed.
- How much Capacity do you need for your Hard Drive?