If you have some video or a lot of photos, or even an old computer you've probably run short on storage space at some point. So, if you're looking at a new computer, or to upgrade your old one, what's the deal on hard drives?
Well, economically speaking I'd recommend an online store such as www.newegg.com or www.tigerdirect.com or many others. However, with Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) coming up you could Google “Black Friday” and probably go to a store with a mob of people and get a really good sale on a hard drive or three. Remember you'll always pay more for the convenience of getting one right now at a brick-and-mortar store than you would by ordering online or waiting for it to be on sale.
Now, as far as storage: Have you ever purchased a brand new, say 200 GB hard drive and installed it just to have Windows report it as 186 GB? What? Why is this? Well, it is perfectly normal, and goes back to the concept of dividing by 1024 instead of 1000 as I tried to explain in THIS article. There have been lawsuits and spirited scientific and “nerdy engineer” debates over this, but it all comes down to manufactures calling a unit of measure 1,000 or one million and Windows or other operating systems working off of base 2 and dividing by 1024. That is where you get the difference.
The bottom line here is that you should automatically deduct about 7% from the “advertised” storage amount to reconcile this difference. So, my large 750 GB external drive I have really reads at 698 GB. Ah, but there's more!
You do NOT want to completely fill up a hard drive. I've done it before and it's painful! As the drive gets nearly full the computer slows way down because it is trying to “eek out” those last available sectors (writable areas) to write to and your files are fragmented or scattered between open spaces on the disk. Hmm, that's a topic for another day, disk sectors and how it writes physically to the disk, but I digress.
In short, the more full the drive is (or if you have never defragmented your drive), the more it has to “split up” files between small empty spaces. It is kind of like going to the store and coming home with a bunch of groceries. If your refrigerator is empty you can put all of the groceries in one convenient corner of the fridge. However, if your fridge is full you spend extra time searching for every little nook and cranny to cram small items into. This would slow you down in putting the groceries away, just as it greatly slows down a hard drive in writing a big order (grocery order) or file to the drive.
Therefore, I would recommend leaving about 10 to 15% of your drive empty at all times. Actually Windows likes you to have 15% I think it is free to defragment (rearrange the refrigerator putting like things together). You've got to have some “elbow room” to rearrange or defragment.
So, given that 7% is “eaten up” (ha a great grocery pun!) by the 1000 versus 1024 deal and that you need about 13% average free at all times, I tell people to plan on 20% of any hard drive purchase to be “untouchable”. What does this all translate to? I'll include a nifty chart. In essence, if you look at your old hard drive and see that you have 150 GB of data filled on a 200 GB drive and you buy a 500 GB drive, that new drive will effectively be about 40% (not 30%) full when you get it in and transfer the 150 GB of data over. Something to think about.
| Advertised Drive Capacity | Windows Reads As (7% less) | Leave this much free (14% of remaining) | Effective Storage Space (80% of Advertised) | Advertised Drive Capacity |
| 60 GB | 56 GB | 8 GB | 48 GB | 60 GB |
| 120 GB | 112 GB | 16 GB | 96 GB | 120 GB |
| 200 GB | 186 GB | 26 GB | 160 GB | 200 GB |
| 320 GB | 298 GB | 42 GB | 256 GB | 320 GB |
| 500 GB | 465 GB | 65 GB | 400 GB | 500 GB |
| 750 GB | 698 GB | 98 GB | 600 GB | 750 GB |
| 1000 (1 TB) | 930 GB | 130 GB | 800 GB | 1000 (1 TB) |
| 1.50 TB | 1.395 TB | 195 GB | 1.2 TB | 1.50 TB |
In summary, don't be fooled by the advertising and such, yes you really do get that many millions of bytes or whatever, but in essence you need to remember the chart above for how much you can reliably store on the drive. Until next time, have fun and store stuff!
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p.s. I talked a lot about defragmenting hard drives. Windows Vista does this automatically for you (when you're probably least expecting it, I hate automatic!) In Windows XP here's some directions from my Windows help file:
"To open Disk Defragmenter, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter." Here you will see the status of your drives and can defragment them. Remember to keep about 15% free for it to work well.
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