The Hard-Drive

A hard drive is a a magnetic disk on which you can store computer data. The term hard is used to distinguish it from a soft, or floppy disk. Hard disks hold more data and are faster than floppy disks. A hard disk can store terabytes of data these days.

A single hard disk usually consists of several platters. Each platter requires two read/write heads, one for each side. All the read/write heads are attached to a single access arm so that they cannot move independently. Each platter has the same number of tracks, and a track location that cuts across all platters is called a cylinder. For example, a typical 84 megabyte hard disk for a PC might have two platters (four sides) and 1,053 cylinders.

There are only two real factors you need to know about when choosing a Hard-Drive.

RPM:
Revolutions per minute refers to how fast the hard drive spins. The faster the Hard-Drive spins the faster it can retrieve data. Large Hard-Drives usually spin around 5900RPM where smaller ones will spin faster up to 15000RPM. The fastest Hard-Drives are Solid State Drives. They are chips rather then magnets and store data electronically similar to RAM except they are non-volatile and do not lose information when power is lost.

Size:
Hard-Drives come in a variety of size, from 20GB to 1000GB (1TB). The size is completely up to you to determine. Windows 7 Requires about 7GB and the average game requires about 10GB.

SAMPLE BUILD:

Case: $68.99
Fans: $9.99
Motherboard: $138.99
Processor: $199.99
Video Card: $299.99
Memory: $39.99
Power Supply: $69.99
Hard-Drive: $124.99
Blu-Ray Burner: $79.99
Total: $1032.92

The Hard-Drive I chose was a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM 32 Internal Hard Drive. It’s huge, reliable and pretty fast.
Also grab any old Blu-Ray/CD/DVD Burner. There pretty much all the same (some write faster pay attention to 12x/24x or what ever it says).

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