Think about all the digital pictures, videos, and documents you have. I just took at look and found that my digital collection includes 7 years of pictures, 3 years of videos, more than 500 music albums, and countless documents. All this data takes up a lot of space – my hard drive is now 2/3 full. It’s definitely time to buy myself another hard drive.

Do you know how full your hard drive is? Do yourself a favor and take a quick look right now. How much data is on it? How much free space do you have? My 250GB hard drive (232 gigs of usable space) has 147 gigs of used space and only 85 gigs of free space. From my experience I’ve found that it’s never good to fill a hard drive more than 2/3 full. Hard drives tend to crash if they’re filled beyond 75%. 

I’m close to approaching filling my drive up to the 75% mark. Not good. I need another hard drive. The last thing I want is a hard drive crash!

Most of us have bought a new hard drive at time or another. New drives come in two flavors: internal or external. Internal drives are cheaper but slightly more difficult to install, external drives are more expensive but easy to install and portable. If you think you need a new drive and aren’t sure which type to buy I recommend first buying an external hard drive. You can buy this 500GB Toshiba 500GB drive at Sams Club for $89.67. The thing is very portable (weighs 6 oz.), uses the common USB interface, and backs up your files with one click. If you want a bigger bang for your buck you can get this 1TB (which is 1,000 Gigabytes) Western Digital for $99.84. Of course, Wal-Mart sells a variety of external hard drives from $68 on up. This 320GB Seagate drive costs $78, is very portable at 5 oz, and easily fits in your pocket at 1/2″ thick.

I like external drives but primarily use internal hard drives. Some people are reluctant to buy internal drives because the installation can be more involved. If you’ve never installed one yourself don’t be put off by a little complexity. Here’s the installation process in a nutshell: turn of off your computer, open your computer case, screw in the new drive, attach the power & data cables, and power your system back on. In most cases your PC or MAC will automatically detect the new drive and you’re good to go. All in all installation only takes about 5-10 minutes. It’s really not at all that difficult to learn. Here’s an eHow article which walks you through the specifics.

I buy all of my internal drives at Newegg.com because of their excellent customer service, quick shipping, and access to a wide range of user opinions. A lot of people who buy from Newegg take the time to write their own opinion about particular products they’ve bought. Newegg calls these user opinions Customer Reviews. You can easily access these by going to a product and clicking the Customer Reviews tab (pretty obvious, I know). Collectively these customer reviews and opinions are very valuable because they give you the big picture on an item. If I’m seriously thinking about buying an item I usually skim all the customer reviews so I know the pro’s and con’s. That way when I pull the trigger and buy that item I know exactly when I’m getting. ”Knowing is half the battle” is the phrase that keeps going around in my mind these days. I think I watched too many G.I. Joe cartoons as a kid!

Back to the point – take a jaunt over to Newegg’s hard drive section. This 500GB Western Digital drive costs $55.99 with free shipping. The customer reviews tell me that this drive is fast, silent, and cool to the touch. This looks like a good candidate for my next drive. The only thing it doesn’t come with are these data cables. I’m got plenty of these type lying around; you’ll need to buy some if you don’t have any.

Hope that helps you if you’re in the market for a new hard drive. Good luck!

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