The Benefits of Getting or Upgrading to a New Hard Drive

The hard drive is one of the most important aspects of a PC, laptop, or any machine that requires a huge storage capacity, as it will be the home of your files, programs, even your operating system. So, keeping them safe and healthy is a must.

Alas, there will be a time when you have to say goodbye to your drive and move on to a newer or better one. With that in mind, here are the benefits of getting or upgrading to a new hard drive.

Bigger Storage

Well, not all the time but still, upgrading or getting a new hard drive will give you the opportunity to increase your storage. Especially, if you’ve been struggling with what you already have. We’ve gone far from the norm of having 500GB to 1TB of storage. In fact, we’re already seeing 2TB, 4TB, 5TB and even higher capacities being loaded to our mechanical drives. Add that to the benefit of saving space in your case by having one lesser drive.

Faster performance and more advanced storage management

If you think hard drives are only for storage then think again, these small machines actually also affect your computer’s load times and even overall performance. They are responsible for how fast you can sift through your file and copy and paste data. They also, sometimes, directly manage the loading of your programs.

Which is why you often times see in a hard drive spec the numbers “5400rpm” or “7200rpm”. RPM or rotations per minute is the speed at which the platter, the hard drive’s magnetic disk, spins. The higher the rpm, the faster the read and write speeds and general performance of the drive.

There’s also the fact that each year manufacturers strive to improve the performance of their products and introduce new technologies or features, hard drives are no exception to this. Take for example Seagate‘s in-house “Rescue” feature, a built-in data recovery service and their FireCuda drives with Multi-Tier Caching technology. Improvements may be minimal, even sometimes unnoticeable, in most cases but at least you can be sure there’s some upgrade in performance. So, apart from improving overall performance, you’ll get the benefit of experiencing and witnessing new and improved tech.

Better reliability and build

Your hard drives are mechanical drives with moving parts, as such, they are susceptible to bumps and drops more than any other drive. Of course, as time goes by your drive goes through wear and tear, even if they’re just sitting pretty inside your case or laptop’s chassis. Which is why more than performance bumps and new technology, manufacturers also think of ways to improve the build quality of their drives.

Renewed Warranty and after sales support

Finally, and probably the cherry-on-top is that new drive comes with a renewed warranty. We’re not saying that you change your drive just for the sake of once again getting a warranty, but at least when you do upgrade or buy a new one you can rest easy. Then again, drives don’t frequently break down in a year or two and most manufacturers offer more than a year of warranty, like Seagate’s 5-year warranty program on select products.

Which is why you’re drive’s safety is covered during most of its shelf life. Of course, it is also recommended that you get your hard drives at authorized retailers and stores for warranties to be honored. Plus the added benefit of getting official after sales service and support.

While there are better alternatives to hard drives, like SSHDs or SSDs (Solid State Drives), these are generally a lot more expensive and often times, have lower capacities. Which is why hard drives are still a favorite of people who want to store or have large files.

This article is part of Seagate’s Be WISER campaign.