Buying the best 1TB internal hard drive

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The 1TB internal hard drive is a relative newcomer into the market. Up until recently, hard drives were only available up to around 750GB, and even then that was huge. If you remember even within the past 7-8 years, even a 20GB hard drive was impressive! Not anymore. Now we have something that’ll blow the socks off of anything we had back then. Now we’re talking about terabytes. That is, a thousand gigabytes. People up until now haven’t even been able to think that big!

So, let’s get down to basics. 1TB internal hard drives come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and most important, quality assessments. Not all are created equal; some companies simply put out better products than others. Purchasing a no-name drive isn’t going to save you money in the long run, even if it costs less up front. Imagine the cost of replacing the data that was stored on it! No thanks. So, I personally think Seagate is one of the best out there. The company has been producing hard drives since 1979, and does it quite well. The Seagate 1TB internal hard drive is no exception: It’s affordable and robust. Their Barracuda 7200.11 is one of the leading drives on the market today with a 3 GB/s (yes, 3 gigabytes per second…not bad!) transfer rate over SATA. It boasts a 32MB cache, which makes bringing up most smaller applications and documents a very quick task. It’s also offered in a 7200 RPM format, which means the seek speed on the drive itself is very quick and sure. This internal drive can be bought and installed for cheap…often as little as $80-$100. However, being that this is a larger drive meant for desktops, you’ll probably have to convert it for laptop use. In that case, you’ll need to buy an enclosure in order to hook it up. These hard drive enclosures can be hooked up via USB to your laptop fairly easy, so no worries there. Currently Seagate does not offer an internal 1TB hard drive. Sorry!

Now, let’s get talking about companies that do offer a laptop hard drive in this size. A Western Digital 1TB internal hard drive may just be your best bet if you don’t want to go out and buy an expensive enclosure. The Western Digital Scorpio Blue is a 2.5″ hard drive built specifically for notebooks. This is a hard drive much on the same level as the Seagate, with a few drawbacks: it has a 3 GB/s transfer rate, but it has a 5200 RPM seek speed (vs. 7200 above), and only an 8MB cache. That’s alright…what it lacks in speed it’ll make up for in space, right? This drive is also cheap: It can be found new for $100 or so.