Internal Hard Drives

On most modern computers, all the connectors are already present inside allowing you to simply open it up, and plug in your new drive. With hard drive prices falling as quickly as capacity is increasing. 200Gb, 400Gb and even Terrabyte (1000Gb) hard drives are now appearing on the market at very competitive prices.

Once your new hard drive is in place, you have to decide how to use it. Most people simply opt for this second drive to act as a massive folder, used for storing photos, videos and music etc... Personally, I think the best thing to to with a hard drive of 120Gb or above is to partition it to give three or four separate "logical" drives. That way one section can be used as a full back-up of your current system in case your original hard drive fails.

You could combine this new hard drive with a "hot swap" bay which sits in an unused 5.25" (CD-ROM) bay in the front of your computer and allows you to remove the drive at will. This combines the reliability of having an internal hard drive and the security of an off site storage facility at the same time.

For the ultimate safeguard against losing your data, consider adding a PCI "RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)" Card along with 2 new hard drive of the same size to your computer. Setting these new hard drives up in a RAID1 array allows data to be "mirrored" onto both disks. This way, either disk can fail completely without you losing any data whatsoever. The computer would simply continue to run on the one good remaining disk and prompt you to replace the failed drive. Once a new hard drive was installed, the RAID function would automatically kick in and mirror your entire drive over, once again giving you a complete and continuously updated back up of your data at all times.