This component is probably the most overlooked performance-related component of any computer. Most people think that they can just use whatever money they have left after purchasing all the other components to get a large as possible hard drive for their computer. What they don't know is that some hard drives are made towards high-performance environments, while some are just not fast enough to be categorized as a "performance" drive. When purchasing a hard drive for your new computer, your first thought should be "performance," then capacity. The reason for this is that almost all new hard drives sold have enough capacity for the most of us, but, like mentioned before, not all drives are made with performance in mind.

The most important spec to look for in a hard drive in terms of performance is the RPM rate (Rotations Per Minute). A hard drive works by spinning patters around and having a head that moves across these disks to read and write the data; the faster the disk rotates, the faster the head is able to reach the data. The most common RPM rates for an IDE (explained later) hard drive are 5400RPM and 7200RPM and obviously, the latter will provide a greater amount of performance, sometimes even up to 50% faster! Because of this, I would recommend you try to purchase a 7200RPM hard drive, regardless if you have a low-end processor or a high-end processor, as the performance boost you get far outweighs the little bit of extra dough you'll be spending on it.

I mentioned above about a data transfer interface called IDE. This interface is currently the most common hard drive data transfer interface and the performance you can achieve from it is quite nice, almost matching the level of performance that the much more expensive SCSI interface can achieve; therefore, I would recommend you purchase a hard drive based on the IDE interface as getting one with a SCSI interface would be pointless unless you are using this new computer for server purposes (or professionally video editing) or if you have a lot of cash to burn.

There are many different types of IDE interfaces that are available, but there are only 2 that are currently the standard in the computer industry: UDMA66 and UDMA100 (or sometimes referred to as ATA-66 and ATA-100, respectively). The names probably will have already given you an idea of what to expect from these interfaces. UDMA66 is capable of transferring data at up to 66MB/sec while UDMA100 is capable of transferring data at up to… you guessed it, 100MB/sec. Now, you're probably thinking to get a UDMA100 hard drive instead of a UDMA66 hard drive because it has a 34MB/sec advantage over it--this is not so! These numbers, 66MB/sec and 100MB/sec, only means the "burst speed," which means that if conditions are perfect (for example, when all the data is loaded into the hard drive's small memory and is directly transferred to the system memory), the interface is capable of achieving that speed. With the hard drives that are currently available on the market today, rarely do we see conditions be perfect, and even if they are, they only last for a split second. So, you see, the extra speed that UDMA100 is capable of is really not that much of a big thing (there are only 2 drives that actually slightly take advantage of UDMA66 even, mentioned later).

After we have the RPM rate and the transfer interface covered, we're left with access time. The access time basically means the amount of time (in milliseconds) it takes the head to go from the outside of the platter to the inside of it. Obviously, the lower the number for access time is, the faster the hard drive is able to move from one edge of the hard drive platter to the other; however, with similar access times (most are around 8ms to 9ms) of most of the hard drives that are currently on the market, this number really does not make a big difference in performance, so you shouldn't worry about it too much. I'm just letting you know so you can keep it in mind just in case you run into one that's really fast or really slow, with the fact that you probably want to avoid the latter.

With performance in mind, we now want to look at the capacity of the hard drive. All drives found on the market these days have HUGE capacities that most people won't need. Starting at 20GB, I bet you that 80% of all users out there will only use less than half of the space. That's the main reason why I said to think about capacity as a secondary feature of a hard drive, unless, of course, you need HUGE amounts of storage for who knows what! I think the largest IDE hard drive currently on the market is a 75 gigger! That's just HUGE for anyone!

The last thing that I have to talk about is brand. The reliability of a hard drive (that's to say, 5 years down the road, will this hard drive continue to spin for you) is mainly based on the brand. A lot of people out there have different opinions about different brands, and I respect that, as not all hard drives are made equal, even if they're the same model and brand. Personally, I only have 2 brands that I would trust for hard drive purchases: IBM and Quantum. I've had many drives made by these companies and I've had very good experiences with them. These 2 brands also have the most innovative products out on the market. The IBM Deskstar 75GXP and the Quantum LM series are the only drives on the market that actually take advantage of the UDMA66 interface. Very impressive indeed!

On to: Networking and Modems