Hard Drive

Your PC's internal hard drive is a real workhorse--the most critical component of your system after the CPU and memory. The hard drive is the hub where your operating system, programs, and data are permanently stored and accessed. If you edit movies, take lots of digital photos, play games, or listen to music files on your PC, a big, fast internal Parallel or Serial ATA hard drive can dramatically improve your overall computing experience.
If you need more storage or a means to back up your PC's internal drives, you can add an external hard drive--available in USB 2.0, FireWire 400 or 800, or external SATA flavors. And if you want centralized storage, consider buying a network-attached storage device. NAS devices are continually improving, and can be a convenient way to add storage that all of the PCs on your small or home network can share.
Today's hard drives have stunning capacities: With the advent of perpendicular magnetic recording, 1 terabyte is the current maximum capacity for a single drive. As always, the drive you buy today will give you more storage capacity for less money than the one you could have bought a year ago. This increased storage capacity has made it economical to turn your PC into a high-powered multimedia machine with plenty of room for accommodating all of your digital photos, a raft of digital music files, and the video files from your digital camcorder or from a TV tuner card.
A single 1TB hard drive can store nearly 120 double-layered DVDs' worth of video. In the end, hard drives are all about capacity or they're all about speed--depending on your needs. Our tests show that all of today's hard drives perform adequately when running regular business applications. Nevertheless, capacious, speedy drives particularly benefit people who process large files, images, and digital video.