Hard Drive
Determine how you can choose a stable hard drive. Just like when choosing other parts of the hardware, your choice should mostly depend on whether the system will be used for gaming purposes, for family or office use, or whether it will be mainly utilized as a media center.
Hard drive technology has been pretty stable for the past decade or so. Hard drive choice usually revolves around the price capacity ration. Beside choosing a SATA/SATAII hard drive and avoiding PATA no one brand is better than the rest. For a family/office computer anything from 80Gb to 160Gb should cover most needs. If you plan on having homemade videos and pictures stored on it then go to 250Gb to be safe. On a media center, the sky is the limit as it depends on how many movies or TV recordings you want to store on it. For gaming, 250Gb is a minimum especially with current games that can take up to 8Gb on the hard drive. While the technology isn’t moving as fast as others small improvement are worth taking. If at all possible, try to buy a perpendicular recording hard drives as they offer better overhaul performance for the same price.
- Family/office computer: 80 to 250Gb depending on the "family" side of things. If you have a camera and take a lot of video and pictures go for 250Gb
- all around gaming computer:250Gb to 320Gb will provide plenty of space while remaining on budget
- media center: sky is the limit. 500Gb is a minimum.
- gaming computer:250Gb to 320Gb will provide plenty of space while remaining on budget
