Buying Advice - Hard Drive Upgrades

Purchasing a hard drive gives you more storage space for your files, and purchasing a Solid State drive gives you a significant speed upgrade. Hard drives are marketed as internal or external.
  • Internal Drive - These are the hard drives in their bare form designed to fit inside of your computer in an empty drive slot, usually at the front of the case. Hard drives usually come in 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch size. The smaller size can fit in laptops while the larger size fit in desktops. The smaller size drives can also utilize an adapter to fit in a desktop system.

  • External Drive - External drives are placed outside of the computer, connect to the computer using a USB or other interface, and can be had for a a few extra dollars ($10-$20) compared to an internal drive. Simply connect it to your desktop or laptop computer, and in most cases you're ready to go. Their benefits are portability, ease-of-use, and re-usability (you can remove the hard drive inside of it and replace it with a different drive).
Here are three good reasons to look into purchasing a hard drive upgrade
  1. For Use as a Backup Drive - It's super-easy to save all of your important data to a flash drive, but flash drives are small and can get lost easily. Most flash drives have a smaller capacity than internal or external hard drives, but the trade-off is portability for storage space. Today's hard drives hold much more than their USB flash drive counterparts. Additionally, there are software packages readily available that will help back up your hard drive regularly and safeguard your data.

  2. To Gain a Significant Speed Boost (Solid State Drive) - Regular hard drives have metallic platters, ribbons, arms, and moving parts that take time when working together to store your data. A Solid State drive (commonly abbreviated as SSD) has absolutely no moving parts -- just the case, circuit board, and a handful of microchips. This equates to the hard drive reading and writing data 2x to 5x faster than a standard hard drive. Work gets done faster, copying files takes less time, and booting your computer takes (on average) about 2/3 less time than before. Laptop users can benefit from a Solid State drive upgrade as well, as Solid State drives use less power than regular hard drives and allow longer battery life. Solid State drives cost more than regular hard drives on a per-gigabyte basis. You may pay $100 for a 2 terabyte (2000 gigabyte) regular hard drive, but pay $128 for a 256 GB Solid State drive. These types of drives can also survive a drop on the floor since there are no moving parts inside. When you drop a regular hard drive you run the risk of destroying it.

  3. More Storage Space - Over time your computer will start to run out of storage space for your photos, documents, music, and programs. As anything mechanical will eventually break down; the logical step is to purchase a new, larger hard drive.
Picture2.5" Drive Case, Portable drive, Solid State drive
If your computer is a name-brand model (HP, Gateway, Dell, Compaq, Sony Vaio), your single hard drive may already be split into two parts. One part consists of the operating system and all of your existing files, while the other part is named "Recovery" or "Restore" and contains the essential files needed to restore your machine to the state when you opened it up for the first time. If you choose to upgrade your hard drive when you have a "Restore" or "Recovery" part of your existing drive located on it, the old hard drive will need to be re-imaged to your newer hard drive, and we can provide that service for $60 using professional disk-imaging software.  This service also includes downloading, installing, and testing any hardware updates essential for the premium operation of your desktop or laptop.

If you do not have an additional part of your hard drive resembling those names, you may have existing CDs or DVDs with those essential files needed to restore your machine. If you no longer have those discs or never received them, you have a few options:

  • Purchase a brand-new Windows 7 DVD or Windows 8 DVD - Each operating system will cost around $100 (for Home Premium, higher for other versions) and will allow you to install the operating system on one computer, no matter the manufacturer.

    If you would like to upgrade from Windows XP or Windows Vista  to Windows 7 32- or 64-bit, or Windows 8, be aware that there are higher system requirements for the newer operating systems. You may need to purchase additional memory, (Windows 7 and Windows 8 use more memory than Windows XP), and possibly a video card for the visual bells and whistles. Compared to buying a whole new machine it sounds pricey, but purchasing these items will ease any compatibility issues for a number of years. The same principle applies to Mac OS X discs for Apple Macintosh computers as well, but Apple is conveniently descriptive on which models their operating systems will work on.

  • Search Amazon.com or eBay for install discs - These restore CDs and DVDs are seemingly more difficult to find, but they are out there. If you see your model's restore discs on eBay, it's recommended to use the Buy it Now feature if the seller has that option available and their price is reasonable.

  • Contact the computer manufacturer and request the media directly from them - A few companies will send you your first set of discs for free, but others may tack on a small charge for this. You'll have the same operating system that your computer had installed originally, and the disc or discs can only install the essential files on ONLY that computer, not a newer computer you may purchase in the future.
It's crucial to note that if you would choose to have Digi-Detox install or reinstall your operating system from a set of CDs or DVDs (optical media), the media must be a legitimate version of Windows (PC) or OS X (Apple Macintosh), or have come from the manufacturer of the computer with the model of the computer matching the model number described on the disc(s). Digi-Detox assumes no liability for damage or data loss due to installs of hacked or pirated operating system discs. The exception to this rule is Mac OS X Lion which also came in the form of a USB flash drive.

Hard Drive Interfaces

PictureClick to enlarge
Since laptop hard drives come in the 2.5" size, they can be retrofitted into a desktop case. But be aware that older hard drives may use an older, outdated IDE interface and not the current, up-to-date SATA interface. Newer computers can be upgraded with an interface card to accept older IDE drives, however. It's a cost-effective way to utilize an older hard drive, but you don't get the benefits of faster read and write times.
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