A hard drive is the main storage area you will utilize on your computer. All of your software is likely to be stored on it along with all of you files. A hard drive works in a similar method to the floppy disk, data is stored by magnetizing sections of the disk creating a one, or not magnetizing sections creating a zero.

Size

Purchase the largest capacity hard drive you can afford. The chances are that in a few years time Microsoft Windows 2009 will fill a 40GB hard drive and you'll have no room for any other software. My recommendation at the minute would be to go for an 80Gb drive.

Speed

The speed the disk inside the drives rotates at is important as a gauge of access speed. Currently you probably don't want a disk that rotates at less than 7200rpm (revolutions per minute).

Maxtor 80GB EIDE HD 7200/8MB/ATA-133 $59.99

Seagate 250GB EIDE HD 7200/8MB/ATA-100 $79.99

Upgrading your hard drive

If you want to upgrade you hard drive in a few years time, it is possible to have a couple of drives simultaneously in you computer. You can just treat them as drive C and drive D. This of course is another good reason to have a spare bay available inside you case.

External Drives

If you want to add a second drive to your machine, you may want to think about having a portable drive. These are slightly more expensive, but if you want to transfer large amounts of data from one computer to another or if you are all out of spare bays inside your case, then this may be for you.