Building A Computer – The Storage

Copying files back and forth can be a pain with a slow hard drive. Downloading can also get bogged down when you have a dying computer that is using an older SATA version. Since internal hard drives are fairly cheap these days, it’s quite affordable to get one with a lot of space. Save yourself some money by buying a bulk version that will ship to you without a retail box (it’ll be protected by a bubble wrap container). You really don’t need any instructions on how to install it. You just snap it into the cage and insert two plugs.

Whether buying a new hard drive as a replacement or additional storage, you need to consider what your motherboard can handle. Newer computer motherboards are all equipped to handle SATA III, which is 6 Gbit/s, as opposed to older SATA II systems, which only run at 3 Gbit/s. Although the doubled speed is theoretical, it makes a big difference for day to day operations. Lastly, if you’re getting a bare drive, make sure you have a spare SATA cable. If you don’t have one, you’ll have to purchase a spare.

Western Digital Black 1TB Internal Hard Drive

I’ve had a good experience with Western Digital branded hard drives. The only one that has failed on me was an external drive that I used for backup, and the exchange process for the warranty was relatively painless. I found the Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Internal Desktop 3.5″ Hard Drive (WD1002FAEX) on sale in November so I bought two of them. 2 Terabytes is plenty of storage for me since my old computer had less than 1TB total and I wasn’t even using half of it. Still, it’s nice to have extra storage space for photos and all the computer work I’ve been doing lately.

I think that I might invest in a NAS in the future, so I’ll be storing most of my media on that. Plus, it will be nice to have a private cloud that I don’t have to pay a monthly/annual fee for. Not that I’m paying for cloud storage now, but the free services only give you so much. Anyway, the Sabertooth Z87 can handle SATA III, so that’s what it gets.

Building A Computer Series

1. The Case
2. The Motherboard
3. The Cooler
4. The Power Supply
5. The CPU
6. The Memory
7. The Storage
8. The Operating System
9. The Graphics Card
10. The Hard Drive
11. The Optical Drive
12. The UPS