Best PC Upgrades

Hard Drive

Hard drives keep growing, and we keep finding more ways to fill them up. For data pack rats, a new type of storage technology called perpendicular recording enables users to pack much more information into new drives, by arranging the data bits so that they align perpendicularly to the magnetic media.

Seagate's 750GB Barracuda perpendicular desktop drive costs about $420; the first 1-terabyte desktop drives should show up next year, along with 500GB laptop drives. These drives require SATA, the preeminent hard-drive interface for desktop systems, but no special drivers.

You'll need to be running Windows Vista to reap the benefits of another new type of drive, called a hybrid hard disk. Such drives mate 128MB or 256MB of high-speed nonvolatile flash memory with the spinning disks of a regular drive. Hybrid hard disks offer speed and power improvements, rather than additional space, and will primarily benefit laptops.

By writing to the drive less frequently and in larger chunks, a hybrid unit can significantly extend a typical laptop's battery life, according to Samsung. In addition, both Vista and Vista-optimized applications will be able to load faster with hybrid drives because they'll store part of the OS in flash memory; and disk reads and writes in general will be faster with the hybrids.

SATA for Your Upgrade

If you're going to add a new drive to your system, go with a SATA drive, even if you have to buy a new SATA controller card to accommodate it. The extra $25 or so for the card will pay off when you move to a new PC and you can easily reconnect your new drive to that machine. SATA drives are generally easier to install than their IDE predecessors, with thinner cables that allow better airflow inside your system. We've seen little performance advantage in using a SATA-300 drive rather than a SATA-150 drive, so take your pick.

When you buy, calculate the price per GB for each of several drives in the capacity range you're considering. The latest, supercapacity drives, like Seagate's 750GB monster, will always carry a significant price premium, but the sweet spot for hard drive value jumps around quite a bit.