The hard drive is one of the  most important components in your computer.

It is your primary  communications center and data storage area for all of the  information you use on you computer.

This is where the operating system, application files, device drivers and utilities are stored. It is also where you store your created documents, photos, music, games and all of the documents you work with.

If you plan to do some heavy duty graphics and video editing, you should get the largest, fastest drive you can afford. Today's drives are inexpensive, fast and highly reliable. You will experience a large  improvement in your system's overall performance.

The Hard Disk Drive Review

There are two basic types of hard drive interfaces.

The Small Computer System Interfaces (SCSI) and
 the Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE).
 

In the recent past, the SCSI was the expensive, faster, hard drive alternative to the slightly slower, inexpensive IDE.

The Small Computer System Interfaces (SCSI) Is still being improved and used in systems that requires its special features. However, unless you are sure that you really need a SCSI drive for  your particular system. I would recommends that you stick with the IDE drives. 

The Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE)  are simpler, cheaper, and have become extremely faster and more flexible during the past years. they are available in sizes up to 500GB. They have increased in speed and size but have decreased in cost.

This cost decrease benefits those of us who would like to have more drive capacity. You can actually build your drive capacity to equal that used by multimedia systems by creating an array of drives using the extra space in side your case and by adding external drives.

And you don't have to use one big drive size to build your drive capacity. As of this writing you could find internal and external  and drives in the following sizes:  20GB, 40GB, 80GB, 120GB 200GB, 250GB, 400GB and 500GB. There are probably other sizes that I'm not aware of, but this is enough to make my point.

While The IDE has more than one drive size, it also has more than one name. It is also known as the AT Attachment interface (ATA). It has all of its controller electronics on the drive itself. This means you don't have to spend extra money buying a separate disk drive controller card, its all part of the drive. A point to remember, the IDE and ATA are the same standard.      
 

The Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE)

Like everything else in computer technology, the IDE Interface has been upgraded to a faster version called The Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE). This drive is the second IDE standard that are called ATA-2 and EIDE/ATAPI (AT  Attachment Packet Interface)

The important points to remember about the EIDE interface is that its speed  is twice as fast as the IDE's. The IDE runs at 8.3MBps while the EIDE runs at 16.7MBps. The EIDE also support at least four IDE devices if you have the space inside your system's case.