Replacing Your Hard Drive When Upgrade To Windows 7
When talking about computers we hardly hear people mentioning the hard drives, only when some new capacity or new technology coming on the market: 500, 1000, 2000 GB discs at high speed, low consumption models, etc.
However, it is not even necessary to make a research on the developments of this particular hardware to find a good reason to change the hard drive. In fact, each new generation is faster than the previous, thereby shorten the boot time and application start-up. Accordingly, as Windows 7 is out by the beginning of the year 2010 and many current users of Windows XP are seriously considering an upgrade to the new Microsoft OS. Where is the question? Why not combine the two? Reinstallation is necessary anyway to move from XP to 7; a new hard drive could provide better performance in the new system. That was according to our test with an old computer which we replaced the 80 GB hard drive with a most famous brand new 500 GB.
Understand the performance of hard drives
There are some things to know when we start looking for a new hard drive, starting with the base, which applies to all models. Hard drives consist of one or more spinning platters and heads responsible for read and write data (as on old turntables, but on both sides of the pan.) There are different interfaces for connecting to computer disks and a range of technologies from affecting performance, as cache memory or the command reorganization (the famous NCQ, Native Command Queuing). The basic concept has not changed since the first drive, but the density of data written to each of the plates has increased dramatically in recent years; today there are hard drives with a capacity of 2 TB spread over 4 plates.
Then, there is a whole range of parameters with which manufacturers can vary on their production bench. Access time and performance input / output in fact depend on agility, the positioning speed and accuracy of the heads, but also the speed of rotation of the plates, since rotational latency (the time that elapses between when the head moves into position and when it passes the requested data) is shorter if they run faster. Higher the speed of the rotation, the speed of sequential flow is accordingly higher, but also more stringent requirements for accuracy and strength and a decrease in recording density (and therefore capacity). In recent years, power consumption has become one of the most important criteria; it is often directly proportional to performance (as well as heat dissipation). Finally, the speed often goes hand in hand with noise, which is mainly caused by the rotation of the plates and by the read / write. Overall, it is recommended to always opt for a model as recent as possible. The hard drives of latest generation generally have a better recording density than their predecessors, which often enables them to store the same amount of data on a smaller number of trays, a development that has many advantages, particularly in terms of energy savings. Newer disks also show better performance.
Replacing your hard drive: what impact?
In real situation, the performance gap between a given hard disk and its direct successor is often not sufficient to justify. There are however other factors to consider. To determine our test, we took a desktop three years old, based on a Core 2 Duo processor and features an 80 GB hard drive, one of the best models of 2006; we then replaced this last component by the latest hard drive for a 7K2000 or (2TB). If the current hard disk is a few years old, by replacing it with a newer model should bring you several advantages:
Higher capacity at lower cost.
Higher Performance.
Lower consumption.
Probably less noise.
To be truly comprehensive, we proceeded in three phases. We began by comparing the 80 GB with 7K2000 on our test platform "low level", then we copied the installation of Windows XP on the new drive to obtain a direct comparison SYS mark 2007, and finally, we installed Windows 7 on two discs and have repeated the same tests.
The scenario: a three year old PC
We have assembled a representative of a desktop PC with average configuration in 2006. It was this year that the processor manufacturer has decided to launch its famous Core 2 Duo, for this reason, we opted for an entry-level model.
