Having powerful hard drives in your computer system is one of the biggest factors in high performance. The don't get much credit for system speed because you think of them as being just a place for dumb data storage. It's true that it is just a stack of magnetized plates that spin at the RPMs of an Indy 500 race care, but the wonder is at how fast and efficiently these devices can transport so much data. If you pull out a hard drive from your computer and look at its underside you'll find a very sophisticated work of circuits and chips. This is all needed for the fast and furious control system to handle the flow of billions of bits that pass from the plates to the cable out to the motherboard. The computer's operating system likes to rely on the hard drives to expand its random access memory (RAM) by swapping data to the disks. RAM moves data around very quickly, so even fast hard drives lag way behind in thinking power. Having the fastest drive possible can speed things up tremendously in the whole system. With the recent development of faster Serial-ATA controllers the speeds are way up.

Most of us don't think much about hard drives beyond whatever is installed in a computer system we buy. To save a little on the price the standard configuration cuts corners on the hard drives, leaving you with fairly cramped storage space and sluggish data transfer rates. This is certainly alright for common usage, but for those with a little more urgency you can replace or even install additional hard drives into your system. Typically you can run three drives in a computer and really speed things up. Some of the big names in hard drives are Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM (of course), Seagate, and Hitachi and there are some large retailers that give great deals on these products. These manufacturers put a lot of emphasis on developing powerful devices and on packing as much storage density as possible onto the data plates. It seems that when we reach a new level of great storage capacity in hard drives we wonder how we could ever use all that space. The fact is that we always find bigger things to store on our hard drives.