Hard Drive Information

The selection of a primary storage drive in important because it is where your operating system and applications will be housed - so you need to make sure there is enough space for what you need now as well as room to grow for the future. How quickly your operating system and programs load is also largely affected by the speed of this drive, so if you demand fast overall performance from your computer you don't want to skimp here.

Traditional hard drives operate by storing data on a spinning metal disk, called a platter. The more platters there are in a drive, and the more data that can be crammed onto each platter, is what determines the overall storage capacity of a given hard drive. Having more platters also tends to mean louder drives, though rotational speed affects that as well. Rotational speed also impacts the drive's performance: if it spins faster it can read or write more information per second.

Another storage option is solid-state drives, which don't have any moving parts. Instead they store data in a flash-like memory - similarly to how memory cards for cameras and other devices operate. This makes them completely silent, but they tend to cost a lot more for the same amount of storage when compared to normal hard drives. They can also perform faster or slower than hard drives, depending on the way they are manufactured; here at Puget Systems we've chosen to carry only the highest quality solid-state drives, so if you choose to invest in one you will get excellent performance.