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You need gigabytes or performance? Laptop upgrades, or a screaming new gaming PC? We carry what you need to know to get the right storage solution for your PC.

Storage. Always needed, often overlooked.

Often lost in the excitement around the latest DirectX 11 GPUs and CPUs hexacore is the ability to store and retrieve your stuff. Your applications, games, photos, digital music and everything that lives on your hard disk. But the boring old rotating magnetic disk just does not seem exciting or high-tech - even though the technology is in a hard drive actually pretty incredible.

A technology that has a bit of memory is sexier, SSDs - Solid-state drives to flash memory technology. But SSDs are not a perfect solution, as we shall soon see. We cover the entire range of storage options for your operating system and applications to help you understand better what the best storage solution for your needs. (Note that we are not about optical storage media, that's really secondary to speak these days.)

We'll first briefly technology and jargon, then look at various scenarios, and try to focus on the storage options could be useful and cost effective. But first, let's talk tech. We will first briefly drives, then take a quick look at SSDs.

Good Old Fashioned Hard Drives

Disks coated with magnetic plates consist of small-sensitive material. These plates are designed to be stacked up to five on each other, and run with spin rates of up to 15,000 revolutions per minute. Some high-end desktop drives run at 10,000 revolutions per minute max, but the most performance hard drives for desktop PCs at 7,200 revolutions per minute. The 15K RPM drives are mostly used in servers.

10,000RPM. That's really fast rotational speed. It's about as fast as you can get for a desktop hard drive.

One of the most important aspects of the hard drives areal density - how many bits you can put it on a square inch. Despite the relative maturity of the technology continues to improve areal density on hard disk manufacturer. Seagate and Samsung have both announced hard drives ship in late 2011, offering one terabyte per platter, or 625 gigabits per square inch.

Heads on arms that are moved by an electric motor mounted drive is called, how the data gets written to and read from the CD. Conductor technology is as important as areal density, because the read heads are extremely sensitive to individual bits, if it 625 billion of them must be in a square inch of disk space.

There are several important aspects of disk performance:

• Storage density. The more bits you can cram on a plate, the faster the ride, all other factors being equal. At the same spin rate means higher bit densities, the more data read from disk per linear inch, as it rotates.
• Spin rate. How do you turn a faster drive, read more bits travel under the head, and more data per second.
• Cache. Most hard drives have some DRAM cache. More cache is generally better. The highest performance hard drives have as much as 64MB of fast DRAM cache.
• Conductor technology. The robustness and responsiveness of the engines, which can be the head (the head actuator) moves determines how fast the head moves to different areas of the drive. This applies random access performance.

One thing that does not really affect the performance of hard disk these days is the interface. Even 10,000 RPM drives can not fully saturate 3Gbps SATA I connector. Seagate has suggested that the data come from the latest second generation of its 64MB cache SATA 6 Gbps drive can saturate the bust, but it would be best with short bursts, and no practical impact on performance.

Seagate was first to market with a 7200 RPM, 3TB HDD, but the system BIOS in order to recognize it properly, if you want to configure it as one large partition.

Western Digital and Seagate are also a number of "green" (low power consumption) drives. The WD GreenPower drives at 5,400 RPM usually turn while running the Seagate Barracuda Green drives usually at 5,900 revolutions per minute. Note that energy consumption while actually under heavy load is not so much lower, but these drives also offer a rule demanding sleep modes that consume very little power when idle. This type of technology will be gradually migrated to higher performance drives, as well.

SSD Tech

Solid state drives are still in their infancy as a technology. Products and further develop the capacity increases with time. This applies particularly to the performance for random writes. Often much slower than old-fashioned rotating disks - first generation SSDs were hobbled by extremely slow random write times. This is supported on newer generation of control systems, better garbage collection (which reorganizes the data on the number of small, empty blocks are minimized) and TRIM command with modern operating systems where the OS tells the SSD, the blocks of data as deleted be changed.

The cost per bit of SSDs is much higher than hard drives, and given the limitations of manufacturing processes, the cost per bit will remain high, albeit declining gradually. There are currently 25nm flash memory parts pretty much the order of the day, with 20 nm on the near horizon. Anand Shimpi As noted in a recent article, to prevent the cost of flash chips of ever-lower prices. And given the cutthroat competition delivered products that are not fully baked.

Nevertheless, we were back in using a SSD RAID array in our primary system for everyday use and gaming, and it would be hard to get. The incredibly fast boot times and fast application loading are seductive, and the thought of waiting is painful to load on things. Most people can not afford large capacity SSD or SSD RAID arrays are so modest size drives pretty much the rule of the day. That's one reason why so many 120GB disks - it's right in the sweet spot for pricing.

As for hard drives, there are a number of factors affecting the performance of the hard disk:

• The type of lightning. Drives with SLC (Single Level Cell) flash are faster than with MLC (Multi-Level Cell) built, but lower density, it drives built with SLC Flash memory is expensive. However, SLC drives are based not only higher performance but consume less electricity and last longer. Therefore SLC drives are often used in server applications.
• The interface. In contrast to rotating platter drives, SSDs can saturate newer 3Gbps interface. Therefore many of the newer 6Gbps are moving SATA specification.
• The controller. The controls built into the drive itself is the real secret sauce. Note that older hard drives have controllers, but controllers in SSDs have a much greater influence on performance. The current favorite in the SSD controller Sandforce place with his SF-2281. But Intel controllers are pretty good. It is also worth mentioning that OCZ Indilinx bought a relatively new company controller. So that's controller is likely to continue.
• The firmware. The real problem with SSDs is that they are fairly new technology. What does this mean in practical term? Bugs. If you have different online forums cruise, you will notice that SSDs have often oddball questions, such as blue screens, sudden loss of capacity and more.

Before you put too much into the details of controllers and flash memory types, remember that every good, the latest generation of SSD performance is that nothing short of amazing the offer if you come from a rotating platter drive. Installed after using your PC to your shiny new SSD, you're going to expect PCs to be that reacts - and ask yourself why this is so shiny new laptop bought your spouse just seems so damn slow. Note: It is not the CPU or memory.

A 120GB SSD Patriot Wildfire like this is a great performance for a laptop up to a few years old and with Windows 7

The other important consideration to weigh when you're on the capacity of SSDs. As already mentioned, is the sweet spot at the moment 120 GB drives, built in price from $ 170 to $ 300 for drives in standard, 2.5-inch form factor. Newer 240GB drives cost well north of $ 300 to over $ 500. Would you like a 500GB SSD? Be prepared to shell out almost $ 800 or more. To keep your budget and applications before the expensive step of SSDs. We will discuss some scenarios short.

Now that we have a basic understanding of hard drives and SSDs, we look to find some typical application scenarios.

The Basic Office PC

This could be a common living room PC. It is usually easy to power, often with integrated graphics. The applications are not demanding, either - Office applications and Internet surfing are the mainstays, with some occasional digital photo or media transcoding. The total cost of the system could be under $ 500.

"Green" drives consume less power most of the slower speeds, but also offer added sleep mode to reduce power consumption.

This is the perfect PC for one of these low-power green hard drives. If you are upgrading an existing, older system, cloning the boot drive to 1 TB Western Digital GreenPower or Seagate Barracuda Green will improve responsiveness and to significantly increase capacity.

The laptop upgrade

My laptop is several years old, but you can not really justify refreshing the entire unit only. If the hard disk in the laptop is 250GB or less, definitely consider replacing it with a 120GB SSD. Sure, you give some capacity, but you will gain some immediate advantages:

• Boot times will be much faster. Waiting for laptops to boot slowly, 5,400 RPM 2.5-inch drives is like watching grass grow.
• You can use Hibernate instead of Sleep Mode. Sleep more power than hibernation, but a system with a SSD come back from sleep almost as soon as a system wake up from sleep.
• SSDs are robust since there are no moving parts. Thus, the shocks and vibrations experienced by most mobile PCs have little impact on an SSD.

If you need capacity into a laptop, it fits at 7,200 rpm, 750 GB hard drive from Western Digital the bill.

If you really need capacity in your laptop - you travel a lot with the camera, for example, and are frequently copying and editing photos - get a high capacity, 7,200 RPM drive, as Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB hard drive. An interesting alternative would be Seagate 500GB Momentus XT hybrid, a 4GB flash-memory cache, combined with a 7200 RPM hard drive is. The performance is slightly better than a standard hard drive, although the gains are not nearly what they will with a real SSD.

A Digital Media Studio

To edit a lot of photos - especially raw DSLR photos. Or you can record videos and you need a fast system with plenty of capacity to edit your digital movies. They have both the capacity and performance, because waiting times for large media files to load painful. But what you get depends on your budget. There is also the problem of data security - backups are important, but we do not discuss here.
Let's look at some possible storage configurations.

• If your budget is tight, consider a 7,200 RPM, 2 GB hard disk with 64 MB cache. This usually costs $ 150 or less.
• If you have a few dollars more, you build the system with a fast 1 TB drive for applications and a secondary, 2 TB hard drive for data and scratch files.
• If your budget can be several hundred euros to spare for storage, a third, 2 TB hard drive and combine them in a RAID 1 (that's right, RAID 1) array for data redundancy. The write performance is a tad slower, but read performance of RAID 1 is actually a little better than a single drive.
• If you have a boatload of money, get a 240-256GB SSD as a boot drive. Use that for the applications and for the scratch files. Put all the data on a second, 2 TB RAID 0 array. (You can have 3 TB drives, too, but you can be technical problems with some motherboard BIOS occur and the need to configure it as a GPT partitions if you use Windows.)

Unless you're filthy rich, you will not build an all-SSD digital media editing system - capacity often is king here. If you are filthy rich, it may be worth a visit dedicated hardware RAID cards and RAID 10 arrays, or something similar.

Killer Gaming Rig

Games really benefit from the speed of SSDs - but games take a large amount of disk space. If all you can afford it, is a modest gaming system - under $ 1000 - SSDs are probably out of the picture.

Or are they?

For under a hundred bucks, you can pick up a 60GB SSD. But don't use it as a boot drive. Instead, build your gaming system using a motherboard with an Intel Z68 chipset and use the small SSD as a cache for a larger (1TB or so) hard drive. (Intel brands this as "Smart Response Technology.") You'll see substantially improved storage throughput. All you need to do is first install Windows on the rotating media drive (making sure that RAID mode is enabled in the system BIOS), then add the SSD and configure it as a cache in the RAID BIOS or through Intel's software utilities.

Intel Z68 chipset plus Senteo a whole new wrinkle to inexpensive systems and can be a major improvement in speed with minimal cost than buying a faster CPU - but for a gaming rig, we would choose a faster graphics card, and victims of the SSD if we on a really tight budget. At the moment, Senteo is only on the Z68, so AMD users or gamers with Intel X58 Triple channel rigs on this option.

These 250GB SSD Intel 510 is an excellent solution for high-end gaming rig, if you can afford it.

If you have a generous budget for a gaming system, is a 250 GB hard drive handle your important applications, as well as a number of games that you can have a second drive for other types of information when you need it. And if you have a lot of money happens to left hand, is a second 250GB SSDs in RAID 0 mode, actually cheaper than a single 500GB SSD on the market today.

Each storage needs are different, but it used to be simple: Find a hard drive with the right combination of price, performance and speed for your needs. Today, however, SSDs have the edge equation, and the right mix for your own needs may be the right mix of SSD and HDD. This combination is what depends on your needs, budget and technical inclination.