The Cheap Hard Drive Guide and How to Buy a Quality Cheap Hard Drive



 

How to Choose the Right
Hard Drive

IDE vs. SCSI Hard Drives


IDE/ATA
Hard Drives

SCSI
Hard Drives

Fibre Channel Hard Drives

Firewire
IEEE 1394
Hard Drives

USB and Portable
Hard Drives

RAID
Hard Drives

Hard Drive
 Repair and Maintenance

Glossary of Hard Drive Terms

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    Formatting a Hard Drive

        Formatting your hard drive is great way of cleaning your system of all the old files and bugs that may be currently on your PC. It is also something you may need to do to a new hard drive before you install the operating system.

        When the first PCs came out, many thought formatting the hard drives was a bad thing and it would lead to a loss of data. While this may be true in some cases, there are benefits of formatting your hard drive, and there are steps PC users should follow in backing up your data before continuing this operation.

    Why Format a Hard Drive?

        Formatting a hard drive can help eliminate file corruption, correct slow running systems and get rid of error messages that keep popping up. Formatting your system's hard drive should restore your computers performance to an almost "new out-of-the-box" state.

        If you happen to have your operating system (OS) CD and all the software and drivers for the hardware in your computer, then this should be an easy task to accomplish. Often, major manufacturers of computers supply "restore" CDs so you can put your computer hard drive back to the way it was originally when you first purchased it.

    Step-by-Step Procedure to Format a Hard Drive

         Before formatting your systems hard drive, there are few items you should do and have ready. Please read over the checklist below:

    • Backup any information that you feel is important. Formatting will in a sense erase your hard drive of all its data. It does not do this totally though and even after a high-level format data can be recovered. If you want to learn how to really erase all data from your hard drive so nothing is left to recover, go to this page.

       
    • Gather all of your original CDs and disks if you have them, and any documentation that came with your computer.
       
    • Gather any additional software that you may want to reinstall.

       
    • Go to "Device Manager" on your system, copy down and make a list of the devices and/or the drivers that are being used.

    Note: If your computer system came with a "Restore Disk" from the computer manufacturer, be sure to use it instead. The information on that disk should have everything you will need to repartition, format and reload software to its original condition.

         If you are going to reinstall Windows XP from a CD, the installation instructions will guide you through re-partitioning and re-formatting the drive. The following instructions are for those who wish to go through the manual process of formatting a hard drive.   

         Once you feel comfortable that the above checklist is completed, then you are ready to format your hard drive and begin the next step of reinstalling your machine's operating system.

    Starting with a Clean (New) Hard Drive

    If you are beginning with a new hard drive, you can use FDISK, a DOS program that comes with Windows to partition the drive. The drive needs to have active partitions before it can be correctly formatted for installation of an operating system.  To learn how to use FDISK go here for full instructions. Or, as stated before, you can partition by reinstalling Windows.
    1. Start the Windows installation process by booting from your Windows CD.
    2. Windows will ask you if you know that Windows is already installed. Say yes.
    3. Delete the current partition and reassign the drives.

    NTFS vs. FAT32

    Confused on which drive format to choose? Here's a brief guide.

     
    • FAT stands for "file allocation table" and comes in two varieties: FAT16 and FAT32. FAT32 is an updated version of the old FAT16 system; it's more efficient and supports bigger hard drives. A computer running Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me can format a drive only using the FAT (16/32) file system.

    • NTFS is the other type of Windows file system. NTFS stands for "NT file system" or "new technology file system." Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP let you format a hard drive as NTFS.

       Go to: How to Partition a New Hard Drive
          Using the FDisk Utility

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