After a very long and happy relationship, the family PC died. Of course, it waited until everyone relied on it as the sole source of entertainment and then died, but it was a very reliable and happy relationship leading up. This sounds very much like the loss of a family pet - in purely superficial ways, I don't want to trivialize real loss - but I want to offer some coping strategies that might help easy the transition.
Prevention = Backup. Like the necessary hassle of taking a pet to the veterinarian for regular checkups and maintaining shot records, keeping regular with backups is absolutely essential to PC health. For many people, they avoid the lengthy time it takes to initiate a backup until they have a scare of some sort and then start keeping up for a while and taper off over time. What they don't realize is that if they wait until there is a problem, they could be backing up the root cause of the issue. I recommend one start backing up on day one and do it as often as every day - this will cut the actual time the backup takes, it will provide multiple restore points (perhaps prior to contracting a virus), and will keep all changes up to date.
There are many excellent, and often free, third party backup softwares, but both Windows 7 and Mac OSX have great backup and restore options. I highly recommend a complete backup including a drive image. Due to Mac architecture, a time machine backup is basically an image of the drive by default, but PC users have the option of turning this on or off in Backup and Restore settings. A disk image will greatly increase the size of the backup, but it is worth it not to have to re-install all of your software after a catastrophe. [For an explanation of my preferred method of backup, click here.]
Choosing a New Hard Drive - Considerations. In the same way that choosing a new pet involves asking oneself questions of compatibility, so too will selecting the new hard drive of your machine and they are: cost, storage size, performance, and warranty.
Cost: Give yourself a budget, and search around. Prices fluctuate from site to site. Absolutely do not walk into a retail store until you've checked online prices - there can be HUGE differences.
Size: Bigger is not necessarily better in terms of hard drive space. I don't recommend buying a new system drive over 500GB unless you intend to buy a secondary drive of the same size as a backup. System disks are the location of all of your system operation files and, in most cases, the location of your software as well. If you are both storing all of your files and running all of your programs from the same place, especially when you are storing huge amounts of data, then some bottlenecking can occur and performance will be reduced. In most cases, this will be unnoticeable, but not always. If the drive is being used only for storage, however, get as big as you like, but keep in mind, the more information you store on a drive, the more you have to lose in a catastrophe. So, again, I recommend buying two and backing up your backups or using some cloud-based storage service if your needs exceed being able to physically provide a solution on site.
Performance: The rule of thumb used to be that if you wanted a better performing hard drive, you had to buy a 3.5" drive for your desktop. This is no longer the case. Now, 2.5" laptop hard drives are just as fast and offer all the same features in a smaller footprint. In fact, advantages are often that laptop format drives are also cooler and require less power to operate as well as being able to compensate for movement and drops. In my latest foray into HDD purchasing, I actually found that they were cheaper, too. So ignoring the physical size of the drive, the performance will depend on the spindle rate (5400,7200, 10,000 or 15,000rpm) and firmware technologies. Most drives are in the 54-7200 spindle speed bracket. The upper registers will cost significantly more because the technology to create these speeds requires some physical changes in disk access, but moving from 54 to 72 can give considerable performance gains as well.
Another factor is AF (advanced format), you may want to monitor whether your new drives support the AF functionality as, at the time I am writing this, software does not use the AF function and the drives are forced to compensate for the older format. Interestingly, I found in my drive selection process that Western Digital drives did not clearly indicate whether a drive was AF while Seagate did. I find this a little disturbing because there are some clear cases of incompatibility, so I recommend you do your homework before making a purchase - particularly if you are using WinXP or Vista.
Warranty. It sucks, I mean it really really sucks when your machine's HDD dies and all of your collected junk goes missing. If the failure is irreparable and you have no backup, it's really really gone. The only possible solution is to send the drive off for data recovery which is really expensive, and still not a guarantee that any or all of your data can be retrieved. However, one silver lining might be to get a replacement drive, at least. In my latest disaster, I was able to purchase a drive with a 5 year warranty over a 1 year for only $5 more per drive - it was even the same brand and better specs. Immediately after buying the drives and installing, I'd recommend you immediately register the products at the company website. This will smooth out the RMA process in case of a failure, and you will already have an account with the support site.
Additional Considerations. Is your computer set to use AHCI? Current motherboards have the option to turn on AHCI in the BIOS. Presently, the jury is out on whether using AHCI improves performance. In my case, it was required to open up all the SATA ports and had the added benefit of allowing hot-swapping of my many drives. It isn't the hidden issue that AF is, but it can be tricky. If you have to do a new install of your OS (up to Windows 7 SP1), AHCI is turned off by default. I have no idea what the logic in this is because all that this element does in windows is not to accept a start up in the interface format even though all of the necessary features are already there and running. So if your board is set to AHCI, and your previous install was operating in AHCI before the failure, you'll need to turn this off in the BIOS and turn on AHCI compatibility in Windows before the feature can be used. In my case, the machine would not boot up, even after this process was properly carried out, until I removed my incompatible SATA DVD drive from the boot sequence.
