But let's also remember that less than 20 short years ago in the mid-'90s, Mac was offering Performas with or MB hard drives, which would hold about 50 songs.
All this being said, is it worth is to get a hard drive that's gigantic so you can keep it into eternity? Or should you skew small and upgrade as you go? First off, definitely don't go buying a computer with the biggest hard drive that's currently available. Now, even your smartphone probably has at least a 16GB hard drive. Naturally, what you put on your computer will affect how your hard drive needs to expand.
If you're working with a lot of graphics programs like Photoshop or InDesign, you're going to take up a lot more space than, say, my mother, who's primarily using a word processor to make grocery lists.
We should point out that we're speaking mostly of hard-drive capacity here. If you were under the impression that hard drives have more to them than just storage, you're correct.
Just for a quick rundown, a disk-type hard drive has magnetic disks that spin really fast to record and store data. These are the most widely available hard drives, but they're also the ones you need to watch out for if you drop your laptop get those spinning disks out of whack and your hard drive follows.
Instead of spinning disks, they use the same technology as flash drives for storage. This means that jostling won't hurt them, and you won't get that "laptop burn" when you sit the computer on your knees -- no spinning means no heat generated not to mention no noise and less power consumed. These are also more expensive, so you'll probably pay a pretty penny for comparable capacity. Now, let's be clear about a few things that our hard drive will not affect.
No matter how much storage capacity our hard drive has, our computer will not run faster. That means if you have 1TB of space and aren't using any of it, your computer will run just as well as if you had 1 TB of space and were using pretty much all of it. And in this instance, size doesn't matter: If your computer had 1GB of hard-drive space, you wouldn't be faster or slower. If you only have a limited amount of free space left on your hard drive, it can impact performance if the operating system starts using it for a temporary data cache.
Fragmentation occurs when files are split up over the hard drive, usually because there isn't the space to store all of the bytes in a file in sequential order. Excessive fragmentation can have an impact on performance, as the hard drive has to do more work to retrieve each file from various locations on disk.
The more free space and total capacity you have on a drive, the less likely it is that fragmentation will become an issue, and the easier it is for your operating system to keep files organized in an optimized fashion. An information technology journalist since , David Nield writes about the Web, technology, hardware and software. By David Nield. Space for Applications The operating system in charge of managing your computer and any applications you install on top of it take up room on the hard drive.
Space for Files The hard drive is also used to store files you create, including documents, photos, audio and video. Its job is to process data and is usually left waiting on the rest of the computer to feed it information to work with. Hard drives are one of the sources that the processor gets data from, but both parts work independently. A computer's networking components and Internet connection bandwidth affect how fast a computer can access the Internet.
The computer's network adapter, the modem and the quality of the Internet service play the biggest roles in how fast the system can access the Internet. Routers can also play a small role in bottlenecking an Internet connection. Dan Stone started writing professionally in , specializing in education, technology and music. He is a web developer for a communications company and previously worked in television.
By Dan Stone. How to Zoom in on Windows Media Player. Hard Drive Processing The hard drive doesn't affect how fast a processor runs. Hard Drive and the Internet The size of a computer's hard drive has no effect on how quickly it can access the Internet.
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