2024-04-19

hard drive size

How To Select A Hard Disk Drive?

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM06 mins

Hard drive specifications for computers are generally the easiest to understand. There are really only two numbers that are needed to know: size and speed.

All hard drive manufacturers and computer systems rate their drives in GB or gigabytes. This translates to the unformatted capacity of the drive in billion of bytes. Once the drive is formatted, you will actually have less than this number in drive space. This makes size comparison really easy to determine as the higher the number, the larger the drive. Some drives have now reached the terabyte size. Note that a terabyte from the manufacturers is one thousand gigabytes.

Most consumer desktop systems spin at a 7200rpm rate. A few high performance drives are even available with a 10000rpm spin rate. Overall though, the speeds will generally be 7200rpm.

IDE and Serial ATA

Not all computer manufacturers will list the type of interface used with the hard drive. For most people, the differences between the two are very minimal. The performance between the two interfaces is essentially identical at this point. The major difference really is the ease of installing the drives. Serial ATA drives have less cabling and configuration required to install a drive. IDE is often also referred to as ATA.

Most new computer systems will use the Serial ATA format. ATA is becoming less and less common.

What to Get?

Determining what type of hard drive you should get for in your computer depends really upon what type of tasks you will be using the computer for. Different tasks require various sizes of file storage as well as performance. Of course hard drive sizes have exploded in the past couple of years so most systems come with more space than a user will need. Below is a chart that lists some of the common computing tasks relating to what the minimum size and speed hard drive to look for in a system:

  • Word Processing: 250+ GB, 7200rpm
  • Web Surfing: 320+ GB, 7200rpm
  • Gaming: 500+ GB, 7200 rpm
  • Digital Music: 750+ GB, 7200 rpm
  • Graphics Editing: 750+ GB, 7200 rpm
  • Digital Video: 1TB+, 7200 rpm

These are just general guidelines considering the most common amounts of storage space that files and programs associated with these tasks take. With the current size and cost of hard drives for computer systems, it is easy to find drives of larger capacity than the numbers listed above for very little in cost.

RAID

RAID is something that has existed in the PC world for years but is now starting to make it into desktop PCs. RAID stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. It is a method of using multiple hard drives for either performance, data reliability or both. What features and functions are determined by the RAID level, referred to typically by 0, 1, 5, 0+1, 1+0 or 10. Each of these has specific requirements for hardware and have different benefits and drawbacks.

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives are a new form of storage that is designed to replace hard drives. Rather than a magnetic disk to store the data, the SSD uses a series of flash memory modules to store the data without any moving parts. This theoretically provides faster performance and higher reliability at the cost of lower capacities. These are still quite rare in desktops as they are generally too expensive and provide less overall storage space.

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Same data takes more space on larger hard drive

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM06 mins

Why does the data from my old, smaller hard drive take up more space on my new, larger hard drive?

This is a limitation of your operating system, not of your hard drive.

In operating systems using a File Allocation Table ( FAT ) architecture, a “cluster” or “allocation unit” is the smallest unit of storage space required for data written to a drive. There are limitations to how many clusters a hard drive can be broken down into. “Slack space” is the difference in empty bytes of the space that is allocated in clusters minus the actual size of the data files.

The size of the cluster is determined by the capacity defined for the logical drive during partitioning. Using a larger partition means the operating system increases the smallest unit of storage space required for data written to a drive. In systems where many small files exist, more space is given away in slack space. Usually, when data is transferred from a small drive to a larger one (with a larger working cluster size ), the net space required will be larger than the original. On rare occasions, where the difference in capacity is small but the upgrade uses a larger cluster size and the original drive was out of disk space using lots of small files, there may not be enough room on the new drive! Fortunately, this doesn’t happen too often.

This is one of those areas where past decisions limit today’s capabilities. When computers were designed, decisions were made using projections based on the needs of the customer and the technology that would be available “in the future”. As with many such predictions, the reality of our technological advances far surpasses the vision of those who set the standards. In other words, we are a lot smarter than we thought we would be!

The following analogy illustrates how cluster size and slack space work:

If the drive has a cluster size of 2K and a 3K file is written to the drive, 2 clusters are used and there is 1K of slack (or lost) space. If that same 3K file is written to a drive whose cluster size is 8K, only 1 cluster is used, but the slack space is 5K. If the 3K file is written to a drive whose cluster size is 32K then 29K of space would be lost!

This is where partitioning comes into play. When you drop the partition size below a certain Megabyte size, the cluster size drops also:

Hard Drive Space

*Note: Uses a 12-bit FAT, all others use a 16-bit FAT.
**Note: Another DOS limitation is 2Gbytes per partition or logical drive.

There are several ways to partition a drive. The most common method is to create one large partition. That works fine, but as hard drives get larger, doing so can limit the usable space on the drive. You need to decide whether or not to partition the drive at 100% or to split the drive into extended and logical drives.

Which option is best for you? Check out the following example: A customer running programs that create a lot of small files should partition the drive for the smaller cluster size. A customer running a program that creates a few very large files, should be fine with a single large partition. If you are still unsure which option is best for you, we recommend one large partition.

Interested in seeing the cluster size on your hard drive? Run CHKDSK on your hard drive. Locate the line that states “xxxx bytes in each allocation unit.” That’s DOS-eze for saying “cluster size.” If you have multiple partitions or multiple hard drives, you will need to specify CHKDSK C: or D:, etc.

For more detailed information on DOS cluster size and slack space refer to the DOS manual that accompanied your original DOS diskettes or search the Microsoft knowledge base at http://www.microsoft.com/.

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