Adding Hard Drive Territory to Your System

French | Spanish | Portuguese | Italian | German | Japanese | Chinese | Korean | Russian | Arabic

Here is what I call the Elbow Room Hypothesis: Both mankind and his computer tools will expand to fill whatever room they’re given. If you’re bent on becoming a PC power user, I can assure you in fact, I can downright guarantee you that the largest hard drive that you can buy today will eventually be filled in the future. As you discover in this article, even Windows XP demands a chunk of hard drive territory . . . both when you install it and when it’s running. Hence the explosion in hard drive capacities over the last five years or so. I’m old enough to remember when a 1GB drive was an unheard-of dream. Heck, I still have the first hard drive that I ever owned: a huge RadioShack 15MB (yes, you read right, fifteen megabyte) Disk System that I used with my TRS-80 Model IV. (Oh, did I mention that those 15 megabytes of storage cost me over $1,000 in 1983 and that the drive is about the size of a typical modern PC case?) I use it as a combination monitor stand, conversation piece, and possible proof of past visits by extraterrestrials. Luckily, you can upgrade your PC’s hard drive with ease either by connecting an external drive or by upgrading your current internal hard drive. Alternatively, you can simply cast yourself to the four winds with abandon and keep your current internal drive and add a second drive. This article is your road map.

The Tale of Virtual Memory

“Wait a furshlugginer minute here you cover memory upgrades. Why bring it up now?” Good question, and the answer lies in the fact that the pseudo-RAM called virtual memory actually exists on your hard drive rather than as memory modules on your motherboard. Now that you’re totally confused, here’s the explanation: Today’s modern operating systems (meaning Windows XP and 2000, Mac OS 9 and OS X, Unix, and Linux) all use a trick called virtual memory to feed your applications the memory that they need. Suppose that your PC has only 64MB of

random access memory (RAM) installed, but you’ve just run Photoshop and demanded that it load a 30MB high-resolution digital image. If Windows XP were limited to using only your computer’s physical RAM (the memory modules that you’ve installed on your PC’s motherboard), you’d be up a creek because Windows XP requires a minimum of around 24MB of memory itself, and Photoshop takes a significant chunk of memory to run. And on top of all that, you’re loading 30MB of data, too! With the size of today’s documents and the amount of RAM needed by memory-hungry mega-applications, your 64MB PC literally can’t do its job. And don’t forget, you’re probably running more than one application at once. What’s a computer to do? Windows turns to your hard drive for help. It uses a portion of the empty space on your hard drive to temporarily hold the data that would otherwise be held in your computer’s memory. In this case, our hardworking silicon warrior uses 64MB of hard drive space, so the total memory available within Windows (using both 64MB of physical memory and 64MB of virtual memory) is now 128MB, providing more elbow room to work with. Your programs actually don’t know that they’re using virtual memory Windows takes care of everything behind the scenes, so Photoshop thinks that you have 128MB of physical memory. Now that you understand how virtual memory works, commit this to heart: Always leave enough empty hard drive space for Windows to use as virtual memory! How much is enough?

I try to leave at least 1 or 2GB free on the C: drive at all times on my Windows XP machines. A PC that runs out of hard drive space is a terrible thing to see; applications will start to lock up, you might lose any changes that you’ve made to open files, and Windows will begin displaying pitiful error messages begging you to close some of your open application windows (or even restart). Also, note that virtual memory is always and I mean always slower than true physical memory. After all, that data has to be written to and read from your hard drive instead of super-fast memory modules. This is why I’m such a proponent of adding as much RAM to your PC as possible because the more memory that you add, the less likely that Windows XP will need to resort to virtual memory. PC techs call your computer’s use of virtual memory drive thrashing because Windows must constantly write to, read from, and erase data from your hard drive. When you run out of physical memory, the hard drive activity light never seems to go out. And yes, if you’re wondering, all that activity will shorten the life of your hard drive. Recognizing a Well-Dressed Hard Drive When you decide to take the plunge and add storage space, reading this section helps you shop by separating the good specifications from the gobbledygook. Today’s PCs use Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE) hard drives. Although a PC can use an internal Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) hard drive, anyone using expensive and complex SCSI hardware is already a PC power user and can probably skip this article without a second glance. Size definitely does matter Virtually all EIDE drives on the market today are 31⁄2-inch format, meaning that they can fit within a typical floppy drive/hard drive combo bay within your computer’s case. Unfortunately, some mini-tower cases have only one or two of these 31⁄2-inch bays.

Therefore, if you’re planning on parking that 31⁄2-inch drive within a much larger 51⁄4-inch bay the kind used with CD- and DVD-ROM drives you’ll need a metal framework called a drive cage kit. In effect, the hard drive is mounted into the drive cage, which in turn is mounted in the PC’s 51⁄4-inch bay. Most drives don’t come with a drive cage kit, so you’ll need to buy one at your computer shop. (They usually run about $10.) How fast is your access? When you see a drive’s access (or seek) time listed, that’s the amount of time in milliseconds (ms) that it takes the drive to read or write data. Naturally, a lower access time is desirable and usually somewhat more expensive. Drives with access times below 10 ms are usually at the top of their price range, especially when the drive in question has a higher revolutions per minute (rpm) rating. What does rpm have to do with hard drives? In the world of personal computers, just like in the world of the Indy 500, the abbreviation rpm means revolutions per minute. (However, I’m counting the revolutions that the magnetic disk platter turns inside the drive.) And, with a refreshing constancy, a higher rpm hard drive means better performance, just like a beefier engine’s rpm’s mean greater speed in auto racing. Most of today’s IDE drives fall into one of two rpm ranges:

-  5,400 rpm: These drives are standard equipment on most older PCs and can also be found on low-cost Pentium 4 computers. As reliable as vanilla ice cream, one of these drives will get the job done . . . but don’t expect whipped cream and a cherry.

-  7,200 rpm: These faster drives are found on today’s high-performance PCs. 7,200 rpm drives used to be 10–20 percent more expensive than their slower brethren, but lately, the cost on these faster drives has dropped to about the same price point. I heartily recommend that you select a 7,200 rpm drive when upgrading any Athlon or Pentium 4 computer. The significantly faster read/write performance on one of these drives will pep up your entire system.

Internal versus External Storage

I address the idea of internal and external peripherals in a number of places elsewhere, so I won’t go into a crazy amount of detail here. Suffice it to say that I recommend using an internal hard drive whenever  

-  You don’t need to share the drive among multiple computers or take it with you while traveling.  

-  Your PC has an additional open drive bay, or you’re willing to upgrade the existing drive.  

-  You want to save money. As you might expect, with those criteria, I usually push internal hard drives on both my unsuspecting consulting customers and myself as well.  (Well, at least it looks curvaceous to a techno-nerd like myself.) Don’t get me wrong external drives are neat toys.

However, they cost significantly more than their internal counterparts, and you’ll lose some of your precious desk space accommodating them. Most external drives also have their own power cord, meaning that you have to pull yet another AC wall socket out of your magician’s hat. If you really do need an external drive and you want to save yourself the hassle, consider a drive that’s powered over a Universal Serial Bus (USB) or FireWire connection, which means no additional power cable worries. If someone tries to give you a USB 1.x hard drive or, heaven forbid, if you’re thinking of buying a used USB 1.x hard drive I beg you not to do it! The first generation of USB drives were ridiculously slow. In other words, your kids are likely to graduate from college before you finish transferring a single gigabyte’s worth of data from that drive to your PC. Keep a safe distance from that tired drive and call your local antique hardware shelter.