What's the difference between hard drives and power supplies?

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True_Orb

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These seem to be a couple things that I cannot find significant differences between name brands.

What should I look for in a hard drive, or should I just go to newegg and look for the name brand with the lowest price for the space I want?
Are all 400 or 420 watt power supplies for an ATX system pretty much the same?
 
With both hard drives and PSUÂ’s, you really do get what you pay for. If you get a cheap 500 watt PSU, it is likely to be noisy and have fairly inaccurate voltage regulation. Same kind of thing with HDÂ’s a cheap one will quite likely be noisier, have slower access times and data transfer rates, plus the chance of loosing all your hard work when one of the read/write heads comes loose and tears the disks to shreds.

It depends what you are using it for I guess, I use mine for work as well as playing, if a voltage spike fried my CPU, or HD failed I would be pi***d off, so I tend to use reasonable quality stuff.
 
one factor- what are you going to store in your drive , some may need lots of spaces
 
what I am storing in my drive-
small and large movie files, games, lots of 3rd party apps, a lot of text files.
 
also your existing motherboard can support since you don't want to invest much on it
 
for those purposes you will want a maxtor ATA133 with 8MB cache at any size 80GB+. for power supply you will want an enlight 420watt $35 USD. if you have a bigger budget get a antec true power or enermax all can be found on newegg
 
The Enermax looks like its a solid PSU, but what the heck is the top fan for? Maybe I have a weird computer, but there's no hole for ventilation there, does the fan work even next to the top case cover?
 
Orb, you know youre welcome to ask me whenever you got questions like these.

First the initial question:

HDDs: Its all about Buffer (2MB v. 8MB), seek time (8ms->10.5ms), size (1-250GB), RPMs (5,400-15,000) and failure rate. A seagate is gonna run you more than the average Hitachi because they make a more solid product. Its like comparing a Toyota to a BMW.

PSUs: Same can be said, but in this case its voltage, cooling, switch, speed control and (most importantly) solid feed. You want a PSU that dilivers what it claims. Some PSUs that are cheaper dont have terribly stable voltage.

As someone stated earlier, you get what you pay for, unless you buy the newest hottest thing (i.e. 15,000 RPM HDD which runs upwards of $7/GB as opposed to $1.3/GB for 7200).

Second question: You invert your PSU... that fan is meant to be the bottom, not the top. Yes, in this case the plug is upside down but thats how it goes.
 
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