Hard Drive Selection: Which hard drive best fits my needs?
By: Gary Lapin, Ascendtech
As a professional data recovery company, Ohio based Ascendtech Data Recovery Labs (www.datarecoverylabs.com) often gets asked for recommendations on the fastest, most reliable brands and types of hard drives available on the market. Data Recovery Labs is a division of Ascendtech (www.ascendtech.us) and is a forefront authority in the field of data recovery. Selecting the “best” hard drive involves many important points of consideration, but as engineers we will attempt to respond from a purely technical perspective.
First and foremost, hard drive technology and drive manufacturers have gone so far since the first hard drives of the 1950s, that all of the brands presently on the market are very advanced and are similarly positioned in terms of quality. By this point in time all of the troubled players long left the market. The remaining companies have years and even decades of fierce technological competition under their belts and all have learned to strive for and achieve total quality. Needless to say similar processes are used in drive manufacture and most internal components including the read write heads, spindle motors, actuator arms etc, are commonly made by third party manufacturers.
Error correction and defect management are areas of high concern in hard drive engineering. In fact more than three quarters of a typical hard drive’s firmware deals precisely with defect management. In production, hard drives and the individual components are also rigorously tested at all levels of assembly to ensure the highest level of compatibility and optimal operation. Further, despite popular belief, hard drive manufacturers often share technological “know how.” More often than not, questions and solutions relating to quality are shared and discussed with competitors in hope of producing better products. This, in our opinion, mostly resolves the question of brands. Each manufacturer offers many product lines of hard drives with different technological characteristics, while filling all pricing categories. Each is equally likely to have a highly successful model or a poorly performing one. Aside from economic considerations, in selecting a hard drive one should mostly focus on manufacturer’s specifications. Finally, one should keep up to date with firmware upgrades available for existing drives and the issues they correct. Usually a firmware upgrade is a simple process of running a manufacturer supplied utility. This is meant to correct any existing “bugs,” but more often to improve the hard drive’s overall operation and error correction ability.
This leads to an obvious yet critical recommendation. Try to avoid the latest, newly introduced hard drives. We recommend waiting around six months before purchasing any hard drives that just hit the market. This is ample time for engineering, a firmware upgrade, and batch production problems to become evident and for the manufacturer to address any such potential issues. Even if no known problems arise, a manufacturer may still release a firmware upgrade or update that would improve the hard drive’s performance. As an added bonus of waiting, drives that have been out for a while are obviously priced lower than the latest releases.
Our second recommendation deals with hard drive capacity. Try to purchase according to your actual needs with some consideration for the future requirements. When selecting a drive try to go for models with fewer platters and read write heads. As previously mentioned you can easily obtain this information from the manufacturer. Such drives will work smoother, generate less heat, and are easier to work on if disaster does strike.
The third recommendation is to carefully pay attention to the model and select a hard drive that best matches its intended use. Pay attention to generated heat, noise level, and other characteristics. For instance a home PC intended for light duty may do very well with a 5400 rpm hard drive. This drive will be perform quickly enough but do it quieter and consuming less energy than the higher rpm models. On the other hand 7200 and higher rpm hard drives will read and write faster but are generally louder, hotter, and consume more power. Server class components are a whole separate consideration. Heavy duty servers expected to perform flawlessly 24 hours per day, warrant nothing but Enterprise level equipment. Such drives are designed to perform under heavy usage, around the clock. They will typically be more heat tolerant and contain more error correcting algorithms. The tradeoff is that they are much more costly and are usually significantly louder.
Our final recommendation is a consideration of setting up RAID 1 or mirrored disks. If your PC does not have a RAID controller, one can be obtained quite economically at any computer store. If the data stored on the drive is important, mirroring the drive will be an effective, hands-off, behind the scenes way to combat physical disk failure. This will not prevent you from deleting files and will not prevent files from getting corrupted for any “logical” reason. It will however leave you with one perfect copy of your data in the event that one disk physically fails. Every data recovery specialist will agree that setting up a RAID 1 array will be much cheaper than repairing even the simplest cases of physical drive failure.
Whatever decisions you make remember to provide and maintain an ideal operational environment. Shock and heat are a hard drive’s worst enemies. Many of us have probably seen people toss their laptop on a bed or other soft surface. Notebook drives usually have small shock absorbers, but we have worked on and fixed hundreds of cases where drives failed due to a laptop being “harmlessly” tossed around. When installing a drive, ensure it is properly secured and is in a well ventilated part of the computer case. If the work environment is dusty, you should periodically carefully clean the PC with a vacuum wand and use an air compressor or duster to blow all the dust out. This will prolong the life of not just the hard drive but all of the system components.
