The Whole Drive Guide

Advice for the gigabyte-addicted: How to upgrade to today's best and biggest--or keep your current hard disks running smoothly.

With hard drive makers selling the space equivalent of an executive office suite for what seems like the price of a post-office box, why not get yourself some breathing room? A big new drive can help your PC become a well-stocked music jukebox or a digital video recorder, and it can also boost performance. However, if you decide to wait--say, for even bigger drives coming down the pike--you can get more out of the model you have now, and keep your important data safer, by giving it a little TLC.

In this guide we tell you how the latest crop of big drives did in our tests, so you can buy the right one if your current model is running into trouble or running out of space. We also offer advice for keeping any hard drive humming happily.

See our comparison chart: Great, Big Drives. Parallel ATA models still dominate, but Serial ATA units are emerging.

Upgrading: Options and Considerations

If you are running out of room for your music, graphics, or monster database files, it's time to upgrade your hard drive. But beware: Your system and its software may require some modifications before they can work with a drive larger than 137.4GB (see " Lab Notes: Big Drives May Beget Big Problems," for details).

We evaluated 14 drives from IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital. During our testing, Hitachi acquired IBM's hard-drive division; Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will continue to sell the Deskstar 180GXP drive we evaluated, as well as the other drives in the Deskstar line. To rank the drives, we weighed performance, capacity, price, warranty policies, and technical support offerings.

We judged Western Digital's 80GB Caviar Special Edition WD800JB to be the best overall value at just $135. At number two, Maxtor's 200GB 7200 RPM Ultra Series Hard Drive Kit offers great performance and vast capacity, for $350. In third, Hitachi's 180GB Deskstar 180GXP performed well, and its cost-per-gigabyte was the lowest of any drive evaluated. Western Digital's fourth-place, 120GB Caviar Special Edition WD1200JB offers a sweet combination of performance and capacity at a reasonable price of $200. The number five Seagate Barracuda ATA V is one of the first drives with the new Serial ATA interface; it finished third (out of 14 drives) in our performance tests. (See our chart, Top 10 Hard Drives, for more details.)

Maxtor retail drives have only one-year warranties. Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital offer one year on most drives but three years on their premium models (those with 8MB buffers).

You can save money by buying a bare drive--one without mounting screws, cables, or setup software--but springing for a kit that includes those pieces makes setup easier, especially for novices. (For installation tips, see " Install a Bigger, Faster Hard Drive.")

The Test Drive

PC World Test Center results fell into some expected patterns. The 7200-rpm drives we tested were usually faster than the 5400-rpm models, and using a two-drive setup with a RAID card that split data between them was faster than using a single drive of the same type for most tasks (though seek time took a minor hit). Also, an 8MB buffer (memory on the hard drive) yielded better performance than the standard 2MB buffer for disk-intensive tasks such as those in our Photoshop test.

Maxtor aced the speed tests. Its 7200-rpm Ultra Series Hard Drive Kit was the fastest parallel ATA model, and its 300GB MaXLine II--optimized for enterprise storage--was the fastest 5400-rpm drive. The company's Serial ATA-equipped MaXLine Plus II, also intended for servers, was the fastest overall. (Before we went to press, Maxtor discontinued the 200GB MaXLine Plus II drive we tested, but it will offer a similar model in the Diamond Max Plus 9 line of retail desktop kits.)

ETA on Serial ATA? Now!

We tested a pair of Seagate drives, identical except for their interfaces: One uses parallel ATA; the other, Serial ATA. In our tests, the Serial ATA model was quicker--but only the Seagate and Maxtor Serial ATA models were available for this roundup, so we can't yet say what part the interface plays in drive performance.

Regardless, Serial ATA offers several advantages over parallel ATA: Its narrow, seven-wire cables attach more easily, allow longer runs (up to 1 meter), and interfere less with airflow--thereby making smaller, more-compact PCs possible.

They permit faster data transfers, too. Parallel ATA's top rate of 133 MBps is about the maximum that the technology allows. At higher frequencies, the signals carried by one wire can interfere with those on other wires in the ribbon cable--a phenomenon called crosstalk. Serial ATA does not have such restrictions. It supports transfers of 150 MBps already; the rate will jump first to 300 MBps and then to 600 MBps over the next decade. That's far more bandwidth than current desktop drives can take advantage of, but it makes room for future growth.

Aside from raw throughput, Serial ATA has other performance enhancements, such as the ability to queue and then execute commands while the CPU performs separate tasks. Such features may have contributed to the two Serial ATA drives' fast performance in our evaluations.

RAID Means Cheap Speed

For the biggest speed boost from your hard drive upgrade, link two drives using a RAID card, such as Promise's TX2000 (for parallel ATA drives) or S150 TX4 (for Serial ATA drives). In a process known as striping, the card treats the two drives as one, thereby doubling both the number of cables available to carry data and the number of read/write heads that can be used to retrieve or record it. And striping indeed produced a handsome performance boost in our recent tests. (See our test report, Serial ATA Looks Promising, and our News & Trends story, " Hardware Boost for Hard Drives.") RAID provides a major advantage when you're working with large image, audio, or video files. On the other hand, if all you do is open or close small files, you will not benefit from RAID striping.

RAID cards cost extra (the Promise cards we used cost $100, though some cards are as little as $20). In addition, you have to purchase two drives, though you can often buy a pair of smaller drives for about the same price as a single monster drive of comparable total capacity. Another cost of RAID is a slightly slower seek time, due to the controller's having to track data stored on two drives. But that performance hit occurs only during tasks like file searches, and you probably won't notice it even then.

Get Your Drive in Shape

Whether your system cost $400 or $4000, its most valuable component is the data contained on your hard drive, be it your critical business or financial files, a lifetime of scanned photographs, or even that future best-selling book. These tips explain how to maintain a healthy drive and spot trouble before it's too late.

Divide Your Disk

Every physical hard drive must be set up initially with one or more partitions. Each drive contains a table that defines how much and which part of the disk the drive's partitions occupy and which file system each uses. You can assign all the drive space to a single partition (drive C:) or divide it into multiple partitions (C:, D:, E:, and so on) to organize your files better or to run multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, with each tucked safely in a separate partition. Keeping your OS in its own partition--apart from programs and data--also allows you to reformat the partition easily and to reinstall the OS (the only fix for some virus infections or software problems) without destroying other data. Finally, you can prevent fragmentation of the swap or paging file by placing it in its own partition, using Windows' Virtual Memory settings.

Most installation software that comes in hard drive kits allows you to set up partitions on a new, blank disk. Alternatively, you can use the DOS program FDisk or utilities included in Windows. To make changes to a disk that already contains data, use a program like PowerQuest's PartitionMagic or V Communications' Partition Commander, both of which let you create, resize, and move partitions without harming the contents of your disk. To be safe, however, you should always back up your data before performing partitioning tasks; any software or system anomaly during an operation can render your data inaccessible. Case in point: A glitch in PartitionMagic 8.0 rendered our test system unbootable in a recent review. (See " Partitioning Plus Backup" for details.)

Work the (File) System

Depending on your version of Windows, each partition uses one of three file systems--FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS--to determine how files on the partition are stored, named, and organized. The oldest of the three, FAT16, limits files and partitions to 2GB; FAT32 limits individual files to 4GB, although partitions can be as large as 2 terabytes. NTFS is the most flexible of the systems, as it allows files up to a gargantuan 16 billion gigabytes (16 exabytes) in size. Only Windows XP, 2000, and NT recognize NTFS.

One tweak you can make to both NTFS and FAT systems is to set the size of a cluster--the basic unit of file storage on a disk--from 1KB to 64KB in NTFS and FAT32, and from 512 bytes to 64KB for FAT16. Smaller clusters typically waste less space, because every file (even if it's only 1 byte long) uses at least one cluster and almost always leaves its last cluster only partly filled. However, PCs can read larger clusters more quickly, thus boosting disk performance. Our advice? Use clusters of 32KB or 64KB, unless you're seriously short of disk space. The partitioning utilities mentioned above allow you to set the file system and cluster size when creating or modifying partitions. Tools in Windows XP and 2000 also let you set the cluster size on a new partition.

Keep Files Together

A fragmented file is one whose clusters do not directly follow one after the other--an inevitable fate as files are read, modified, and rewritten to the disk. A defragging utility shuffles the disk's data to make each file's clusters contiguous. As a result, the disk can read data faster--less of a benefit with today's fast drives--and you can recover deleted files more easily. Some defraggers may also reorganize and relocate often-used files to the faster, outer portion of the hard drive platters so that they load into memory more quickly. In our past tests of a few utilities, though, we've found no definitive evidence that doing so enhances performance.

Windows 2000 and XP automatically track NTFS file transactions and replace bad clusters; they also include defragging utilities for manual cleanup. If you use Windows Me, 98, or 95, however, a third-party defragger such as Speed Disk in Symantec's Norton SystemWorks or JetDefrag in V Communications' Fix-It Utilities works faster than the defraggers bundled with the older operating systems.

Fix Your Files

The latest versions of Windows (especially when set up with NTFS) have more-advanced features for repairing damage to your PC's file system, but all Windows versions carry disk-checking tools that you can run periodically to find and fix problems. They may launch at boot upon sensing that you shut down the PC improperly or that the system may have disk errors. You should never bypass these operations, though Windows offers you that option. Doing so may result in lost or corrupted files.

In Windows 98 and 95, you should run the disk checker about once a week. Right-click the drive in My Computer, select Properties, Tools, and under 'Error-checking' click Check Now. A third-party disk checker such as the Disk Doctor application included in Symantec's Norton SystemWorks or the DiskFixer in V Communications' Fix-It Utilities is a bit quicker but no more effective.

Hard-Drive Intensive Care

Hard drives are mechanical devices, and as such they are subject to failure. Even if you don't make regular backups, you may still be able to save your data when your drive goes south. If you see signs of trouble such as a 'DISK BOOT FAILURE' error message or nonsensical characters where a list of files should be, it's time to take action. You may be able to recover from disk problems with tools you already have at hand (but only if the drive isn't suffering a physical problem). These tips address some common symptoms.

Grinding noises: If your drive is making scratching, grinding, or ratcheting noises you haven't heard before, it may have suffered a head crash (in which the read/write head scrapes a platter) or another mechanical problem that will destroy more data as the disk continues to spin.

The safest way to proceed when vital data is in danger is to turn your system off and call a recovery service such as DriveSavers or Ontrack. These services will, if necessary, disassemble your drive in a clean room to recover data. According to DriveSavers, recovering an 80GB drive typically costs about $750.

If your data isn't that valuable, and you can still access files, you may take your chances by keeping the drive on and trying to copy the most important files to other media before the drive dies.

Data corruption: If your drive runs normally but files and directories are missing or appear as gibberish, you probably have file table or directory corruption. A virus may be at work, or the disk may be developing bad sectors (portions of clusters that no longer holds data reliably, rendering the affected clusters unusable). Bad sectors often indicate imminent drive failure. Try using recovery software that runs from a CD-ROM or floppy disk, such as R-Tools' R-Studio Agent Emergency (part of the $180 R-Studio network package). It recovers data by reading the information embedded within the files themselves, rather than in directories or file tables. Always recover to another hard drive or to backup media; then run an antivirus program and a disk checker to find errors or bad sectors. If you find any bad sectors, rescan every few days--if more appear, it's time for you to get a new drive.

Bad cables: If your system won't boot and its hard drive has stopped, you may have a bad cable or cable connection. First check that all connections are secure, with no bent or broken pins. Then try different cables (you can swap those from your IDE optical drive). In rare cases, the problem may result from bad connections inside the power supply. To check, put the drive in another system if you have one handy. But don't try a new drive in your malfunctioning system until you're sure the PC didn't kill the original drive.

San Francisco-based freelance writer Jon L. Jacobi is a regular contributor to PC World; Sean Captain is a senior associate editor. Senior Performance Analyst Elliott Kirschling conducted all lab tests.

Throughput: Serial ATA, Parallel ATA, RAID

Drive performance depends not only on how quickly data can be read from or written to the drive platters, but also on how quickly it can be funneled to the rest of the system. Here are three funnel factors that affect data throughput.

1. Controller: The chip that sends commands to the drive to store and retrieve data. A RAID controller can pull data from two or more drives simultaneously, allowing greater throughput.

2. Interface: Protocols and hardware that serve as the data pipeline. Ribbon-cabled parallel ATA (upper image below) can carry data at up to 133 MBps. Serial ATA (bottom) will eventually hit 600 MBps.

3. Buffer: Memory that holds data the CPU is likely to request next. The larger the buffer, the greater the amount of prefetched data it can maintain on hand.

Test Report: Serial ATA Looks Promising

One of the first hard drives to use a Serial ATA interface outperformed a nearly identical parallel ATA drive in some of our tests. The higher throughput of the Serial ATA interface shouldn't produce a performance advantage, since even parallel ATA has plenty of bandwidth for a single drive; but vendors say that Serial ATA may handle data more efficiently. Whichever interface you have, RAID does wonders for file transfers but mildly slows seek times.

How We Test: We attached the single parallel ATA drive to the motherboard IDE controller on our test system, a Dell Dimension 8200 with a 2-GHz Pentium 4 CPU running Windows XP Professional. We attached the single Serial ATA drive to a Promise SATA150 TX4 expansion card. For the RAID setups, we connected the parallel ATA and Serial ATA drives to Promise TX2000 and S150 TX4 controller cards, respectively. All times in seconds; bold numbers indicate best performance. Data based on tests designed and conducted by the PC World Test Center. All rights reserved. ¹ Time required to open a 105MB file in Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, apply filters, and rotate it multiple times.

Lab Notes: Big Drives May Beget Big Problems

Initially, Hitachi's 180GB Deskstar 180GXP drive would not run on our Windows XP Pro-equipped Dell Dimension 8200 test system, although the same PC had no difficulty with Maxtor drives up to 300GB. The problem, we learned, stemmed from differences in how companies implement the new 48-bit addressing standard for recognizing drives over 137.4GB; we solved it by updating Intel's Application Accelerator driver to a version that jibed with Hitachi's implementation. Depending on your setup, drives over 137.4GB may work flawlessly or they may require you to update drivers, the BIOS, the operating system, or all three. And you may still have problems with older motherboard chip sets.

Microsoft provides a starting point with fixes for Windows XP (" How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP") and 2000 (" 48-bit LBA Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows 2000"). And fixes for other versions of Windows may be possible with updates to the system BIOS and the driver for the ATA controller.

You can also get around the problem by installing an expansion card (with its own drivers), such as the Promise Technology Ultra100 TX2 ATA/100 PCI IDE card, which sells for about $30 and comes bundled with Western Digital retail kits for drives over 137.4GB. With such a card, you need not upgrade your BIOS or your operating system.

--Sean Captain and Elliott Kirschling

Notebook Gigs: Beef Up Your Notebook Storage

On many laptops, replacing the 2.5-inch drive involves nothing more than unscrewing a panel, sliding the old drive out, and popping the new one in. Of course, you also need to transfer the data from your old drive--and that can be a challenge because most notebooks have space for only a single hard drive.

Vendors such as Apricorn, CMS, and SimpleTech offer upgrade kits for a multitude of notebooks. In addition to containing a drive, the kits may come with mounting hardware, and in some cases they may carry both data transfer software and hardware for temporarily attaching a second drive. Apricorn, for example, provides a drive cable that connects to your notebook via a PC Card, plus an external caddy that holds the new drive while your files are copied to it. The company will also offer a USB kit soon. After the upgrade, you can use the caddy kit with your old drive for additional storage. Using a $369, 60GB, 4200-rpm Apricorn kit, we were able to upgrade a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 notebook quickly and easily.

Do It Yourself

You can save a tidy sum by assembling your own kit. At the time of this writing, some retailers listed a bare 60GB, 4200-rpm MK6021GAS drive from Toshiba for about $200. Instead of using a kit's custom file-copy software, you can create an image of the old drive with a program like PowerQuest's Drive Image, Acronis's TrueImage (read about both of them at " Copy, Back Up Your PC's Drive With Ease"), or Symantec's Norton Ghost (though our reviewer found the 2003 version problematic). Depending on the size of the image file, you can store it on various media, including CDs, DVDs, or an external hard drive like Maxtor's Personal Storage 5000DV (See " Storage: Maxtor's OneTouch Backup Hard Drive"). Or in place of the Apricorn caddy, you can build one using a FireWire or USB 2.0 drive enclosure such as ADS Technologies' Pyro 2.5 Drive Kit.

Other Options

If you need only a few extra gigabytes, you can slip in a PC Card drive such as Toshiba's 5GB MK5002MPL, which sells for about $250 as a bare drive from Toshiba or for $290 in a kit from SimpleTech. Apricorn and SimpleTech also sell drives that slip into the multipurpose bays of many popular notebooks. We found a $549, 60GB SimpleTech model for our Dell Latitude C640.