Digital Home Thoughts: It is Time to Say Goodbye to that Old Hard Drive

"It is safe to say that each and every hard drive selling today is far superior to older-generation drives, as improving recording technologies keep pushing forward capacities and performance. Other modifications, such as the interface transition from parallel ATA to Serial ATA 150 (and then 300 MB/s), also make a difference. But no individual feature—even Native Command Queuing or a larger cache—can make as much of a difference as simply stepping up from one drive generation to the next."

Hard drives have steadily growing in size, and most people only look to upgrade when their current hard drive starts choking under all the photos, videos and music that we stuff onto them. However, performance can also be another compelling reason to upgrade. Tom's Hardware does a test to see just how much of a difference changing to a newer hard drive can make and the results are impressive. While a new CPU or more RAM will probably see the biggest jump, ff you are looking for a speed boost, a new hard drive should be on your list. What should you do with your old hard drives? You could always repurpose an old PC and make your own NAS, or consider something like a giveaway to those who need just a bit more space.