Hard Disk Specifications for Home Computers

Hard Disk

Get the biggest EIDE hard disk you can afford, but recognize the fact that there are hardware/software limitations that you need to be aware of. First of all early motherboards won't recognize hard disks over 528 MB. You shouldn't run into this problem if your motherboard is younger than about 5 years. The next factor is whether your hard disk controller can access larger hard disks. The key term to look for is LBA (Logical Block Addressing). You don't need to understand it, just that your controller can handle it. This isn't the end of the limitations, though. Current versions of Windows 95 (other than the OEM2 version) can't access partitions larger than 2.1 GB. You can get a larger hard disk, but you need to partition it into 2.1 GB blocks. Today, a 2.1 GB hard disk is the minimum size I'd buy.

I used to buy nothing but Seagate hard disks. It's primarily a matter of personal preference. I've been buying them since 20 MB hard disks was something we thought was more than we'd ever need and have never had one crash. I've owned two Western Digital hard disks in 20 years and both crashed within a year. Consequently I'll stick with the brand that hasn't failed me yet. There are other good brand names out there, but I haven't found a compelling reason to switch brands. I've now amended this preference. Based on reviews such as those at the Storage Review, the latest hard disks I've bought have been IBM rather than Seagate.

You can run two EIDE hard disks at the same time, but not just any two. One has to be the "master" and the other the "slave" which is determined by jumpers found usually on the back of the drive itself. I highly recommend that you stick with the same brand if you install two hard disks. The master/slave methodology is not standardized, so if you try to use to different brands, they may not work together. Forget SCSI hard disks. They have their place in network servers, but they're an expensive option for home computers. Something on the horizon is FireWire (IEEE 1394) hard disks, which have greater throughput capability than today's hard disks and can be daisy-chained together. These keep getting delayed as manufacturers fight over competing formats.

Something else to consider with hard disks is the cluster size. The cluster size is the minimum amount of space a file is going to use no matter what the file size is. In fact that amount of space used by a file will be a multiple of the cluster size, which can result in a lot of wasted space. The following table shows the cluster size for different partition sizes:

Partition	Cluster
2 GB	32 KB
1 GB	16 KB
512 KB	8 KB
256 KB	4 KB
128 KB	2 KB

Windows 95 OEM2 and Windows 98 have the capabilty to format the hard disk with FAT32 directories instead of FAT16. FAT32 always uses 4KB clusters which essentially eliminates the problem and saves a lot of space.

For specifications about particular hard drives, check out The Tech Page or The Ref.

A source for hard disk reviews is The Storage Review.