It’s not an easy task to choose which hard drive is the best in the market. Those hard drives that have the same capacity produced by different manufacturers have practically the same prices, which make it even harder to distinguish which is the best. Depending on your requirements, it would help you decide which product to choose by comparing the hard drives in terms of individual performance and out-of-the-box experience.
Determine first the type of hard drive that you need, whether it’s an internal desktop hard drive, a notebook hard drive or an external hard drive. Since each one has different market, you can only compare hard drives that belong to the same type. You can also refer to the interface used by the drives (Serial ATA or Parallel ATA) for comparison. The capacity of the drives and the drives’ cache size can also be your basis. The higher the capacity drive, the more files it can accommodate and a drive with more cache is a little bit faster. For hard drives that have the same capacity, you can compare the number of their internal platters. The hard drive that uses fewer platters is faster. Choose a hard drive that has higher rotational speed because it will definitely perform better. Take into consideration also the warranty which basically ranges from 1-5 years. A longer warranty may cost higher but in the long run, it will be worth it.
If you are having a hard time dealing with the technical details, comparing hard drive manufacturers can make a difference to influence your decision. There are basically too many of them so you should focus your list on the most popular hard drive manufacturers which include TP Link, Fujitsu, Hitachi Global Storage (IBM), Imitation(®),LaCie®, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital among others.
Fujitsu is responsible for the high performance SCSI drives that the server market is using. They have small form factor hard drives for laptops as well. Being one of the oldest computer companies in the world, you feel a certain sense of reliability towards IBM. They offer a wide range of very high quality hard drives. If you are looking for external and portable variety of drives, go for Imation. If you need high performance storage products for your business or home media entertainment center, LaCie is a popular choice. The most reliable hard drives built for the home, office or enterprise come from Maxtor which is a subsidiary of Seagate. As the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives and storage solutions, Seagate offers a wide range of PC hard drives and high performance SCSI hard drives. Aside from being one of the best hard drive makers in the world, Western Digital also offers fast Raptor Drivethat has a speed of 10,000 RPMs. Then, there’s Samsung and the name already speaks for itself.
