Re: Advice on new system drive

I personally like Seagate, but you can find people who say they like other brands more.

As for size, that's totally up to you. I will say that I don't max out the size of my boot drives because I have no reason to. Everything works faster if your files are on drives 2, 3, and 4, so that's where I keep my stuff. (Even my iTunes Library has been moved there.) I use the boot drive for Applications and their support files and not much else.

So something in the 300 - 500 GB range is good. That's more than I need, usually, but it's good to have a little room to grow, just in case.

But again, that's just me. If you can think of uses for a 1 TB boot drive, there's no problem with that.


Besides the obvious (SATA, 7200 rpm) the one thing I would be sure to look for is the drive's cache size. There are drives with either 8, 16, or 32 MB caches built in. That's not usually something they put in big letters on the front of the box, so be sure to research that before you buy. It's usually on the box somewhere in small print. If an online store doesn't list that info, buy from somewhere else. I know www.compusa.com is one site that lists that number.