4 Benefits of Upgrading Your Hard Drive

Internal hard drives are responsible for storing all your photos, documents and software data. Without them you would not be able to store or easily access the vast amounts of data needed from day to day. When hard drives become ineffective, you risk insufficient data backups, slow load times and may lose your digital content.

There are two ways of upgrading your hard drive: by replacing an existing drive or adding additional drives to increase system performance. Here at Techbuyer we understand that understand that the importance of reliable IT equipment cannot be understated, and so we have summarised the top four benefits of upgrading HDDs.

Upgrading your internal hard drive increases storage space.

Whether you’re deploying virtual machines or installing new software on a PC, realising you need more storage than you currently have is always frustrating. To ensure you have enough room for all your data you can choose hard drives with a variety of sizes and storage capacities. HDDs with 1TB+ of storage are great for future-proofing your system and are therefore ideal for large networks or big organisations that handle large quantities of data and are rapidly expanding. Upgrading your HDD is also a good opportunity to stay above the critical 10% free. After all, applications are only set to become more complicated and will require more space.

You can provide your system with more IOPs.

One of the main reasons to upgrade your hard drives is to see an increase in overall disk performance. The higher the RPM, the more IOPs the drive provides. A high spindle speed such as 15,000 RPM is therefore perfect for applications like SQL arrays as it significantly increases response time and overall throughput performance.

Utilizing technologies such as RAID can ensure that performance is increased further, and as usual deciding which speed is best for you depends on the size and type of your system.

You can prioritise your workload.

Deciding how to position your data is an important factor to consider before upgrading your hard drives. As a business grows, its IT infrastructure often becomes more complex and has more demands, meaning you may need to change your IT approach. A tiered storage solution such as bronze / silver / gold workloads are a great way of giving your applications the speed that they need to operate.

Hard drives can provide great resilience.

The more hard drives you add to your system, the more complex your RAID system can be. RAID setups (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) essentially enable multiple HDDs to work together to improve upon a single drive’s potential and to absorb any disk failures which would otherwise be fatal. RAID 10 provides good resilience to absorb failure but is costly in terms of raw space. A Nested RAID is always going to be more appealing since a larger array of disks will enable you to take advantage of the different types of performance and resilience.

Once more this is dependent upon your individual requirements; the way you position your data is your decision and choosing RAID 10 is not always the best option. Positioning your data requires thorough planning and consideration of how to balance your RAID against IOPs.

Find the best hard drive for you.

Before you install a new hard drive it is important to know what size and type of drive you need, what bus format you need (SAS or SATA) and how much data you are prepared to lose in RAID configuration. Other factors must also come into consideration such as how to prioritise workload and whether you should future proof your system, and so the process can end up being complex.

No matter how complex your system is, upgrading your IT hardware does not need to be complicated. At Techbuyer, we have the expertise and guidance to help you find the best drive for your individual requirements and are always on hand to answer any questions you may have.

We provide the brands you love at a lower price and with a three year warranty, ensuring high quality for a better price. Browse our full range of server storage including HDDs and SSDs to find a cost-effective, high quality IT solution for your business. For five-star rated advice about your specific IT system, get in touch today.