With the amount of video production I do an a regular basis, mostly revolving around recording video from video games, hard drive space is something that is in high demand for me. Here I will talk some about how I plan to save up for a new hard drive soon, in order to expand the amount of free space available to store the raw video before it is processed on my computer.
Deciding What Type of Hard Drive to Buy
The first step should of course be figuring out what type of hard drive I am looking for. There are several tech gadget resources out there, however personally I like to use Newegg when it comes to looking up what computer equipment is currently on the market, as their selection is pretty wide.
When it comes to technical specifications of the hard drive, the choices I need to make in that respect must reflect the need and affordability. In this case, Solid State Drives are out of the question, they offer low space at blazing fast access speeds and at high cost. While the access speed would be good for the amount of raw data that needs to be written, SSD is unnecessary as regular drives have the ability to write large amounts of data as long as they are dedicated to one task at a time. Since my Drive is dedicated, I can settle on SATA 3.0 Gb/s and 7200 RPM and a 32MB cache. As can be seen from this link, Newegg has allowed me to narrow my search to these specs and now see price range and GB size. I will want something 1TB or larger, and the cheapest model sits well within my requirements at 79.99$ with the Samsung Spinpoint.
Saving up to Buy the Hard Drive
Since I’ve managed to pick a relatively cheap drive, I can pick several methods of saving up for it, even ones as simple as saving my spare change from purchases at the store, since even that can make a decent knock in the amount I have to save. Also since I have several sources of income from various online content creation activities, I can take one of these sources and dedicate it to saving money only. Alternatively for those with one source of income, I suggest taking a small percent of each pay-check and putting it aside.
In order to find a better price, there are several search aggregators like Yahoo Shopping or Google Product Search that can be used to compare prices on the Hard Drive. In those two searches, Google’s seems to be the only one showing us a lower price, although at the same time, the results are less reliable and accurate. Either way, both of these sources will be places I would check again before making the final purchase. Lastly, there is always the backup option of searching eBay for a cheaper price, however considering how Hard Drives must be shipped delicately, while eBayer’s typically suck at packaging and buying used drives are usually a bad idea, I would highly advise against this option for a HD under pretty much any circumstance.