4 Common Mistakes Made when Buying a Hard Drive

Buying a new hard drive isn’t a particularly complex process, but there are certainly ways to mess it up. As the hard drive of your computer holds, well, everything, it’s well worth your time to pick out a good one the first time around.

Here’s a look at a few common mistakes that people make when buying a hard drive–internal or external–for their computers.

1. Buying a used hard drive. Used hard drives cost far less than new hard drives, so they must be a great buy, right? Well, not exactly. Operating life for hard drives varies quite a bit, but depends heavily on the operating environment of each unit. When you buy a used hard drive, you have no idea of the type of environment that it operated in. Was it kept too hot? Around dust? Was the previous hard drive owner a smoker?

These things matter. The bottom line is that if you buy a used hard drive, you’re probably buying a drive with some mileage on it, and the chances of a hard drive failure go up exponentially. Stick with new hard drives. They’re really not that expensive, and they’re worth the extra couple of bucks.

2. Buying too small – It seems like it’s difficult to buy a small hard drive these days, as many of the offerings on the market house well over a terabyte of data. Still, there are a number of smaller drives out there, and if you buy too small, you’ll regret it later, especially since the price per gigabyte of data storage is so small.

Here’s a helpful tip: really think about how much data you’ll use on your hard drive, and then take that number times 1.5. Don’t buy a hard drive smaller than that number, or you may experience some buyer’s remorse.

3. Not thinking about speed – Your hard drive’s speed will have a noticeable effect on overall computer performance, so don’t skimp out on a slow drive. Okay, I know what you’re thinking–how do I tell if a drive is fast or not?

Compare them. It’s as simple as that. In particular, you want to look for “seek speed”, which measures how long it takes a hard drive to find a certain couple of sectors. If you can’t decide between a few hard drives, this is a good number to use to make your decision.

4. Not reading the packaging – This is especially true for external hard drives. There may be some important stuff in that fine print. For instance, your new terabyte hard drive might actually be two 500GB hard drives working in a RAID 0–which will be fast, but doubles the chance of a hard drive failure.

Read everything on the packages, and always back up your new hard drive. Remember: they all fail. But with some smart buying, you can find a drive that will last you for quite a few years.

Do you have any tips for buying a hard drive? Post in our comments section below.