How to Buy a Hard Drive

Consider a NAS device. They're a great choice for backup as well as for making photos, videos, music, and other files available to everyone on your network. NAS devices connect to your network via ethernet, which means middling performance, but in most cases they also include USB 2.0 ports to share a printer or to expand storage capacity in case you run short in the future. See ourTop 5 Networked-Attached Storage Devicesfor pricing and specs.

Look for bargains. Competition among hard-drive makers is intense, and dealers often run specials that let you pick up a new drive for an amazingly low price. These deals tend to be on smaller-capacity or slower drives, however. Don't expect specials on the largest-capacity drives, since these may be in short supply and usually sell at close to list price until the next generation of drives appears.

Buy a retail kit. Hard-drive kits include mounting hardware, cables, detailed instructions, and (often) software that eases installation. A kit may also include an application for cloning the contents of your old hard drive onto the new one, which then becomes your new main drive. If you buy via mail order, be sure to get the kit. The alternative is a "bare drive," essentially just a drive in a Mylar bag, often without screws, software, or even instructions beyond a technical data sheet. Bare drives are sometimes available online at bargain prices, however, and plenty of online installation help is available.

Use add-on software. Power users who purchase a bare drive and aren't running Windows XP may need extra software to ease the process of integrating the new hard drive into their PC. Even if you buy a packaged drive upgrade kit, you might want to use Symantec's Ghost or Acronis's True Image to back up and clone a drive. Symantec's Partition Magic and Acronis's Disk Director let you fine-tune how your new drive stores data.

General users: If you typically use your PC for Web surfing, working on Microsoft Word documents, handling e-mail, and perfiorming casual digital imaging, a lower-capacity drive may work for you. Opt for an inexpensive 300GB drive, using whichever interface is convenient for your needs.

Multimedia hounds: If you store a lot of digital images, audio, or video, consider buying a single 750GB or 1TB drive. If you also edit images and video, go forinternalorexternalmodels on our Top 5 hard-drive charts that show the best test results on related imaging tasks; an eSATA drive will give you the best performance.

Gamers: A popular choice for performance-hungry gamers is a RAID 0 rig with two Western Digital 10,000-rpm WD Raptor drives. This kicks up your performance but limits capacity, since the WD Raptor is available only in 36GB, 74GB, and 150GB sizes.

Shared storage: If you want a NAS device, get one with the largest capacity you can find--gigabytes go fast when several people are backing up their own digital photo and MP3 collections. Also, aim for one that's easy to upgrade, in case you need to swap out a drive down the road.