If you can’t use your drive, it doesn’t work to well as anything else. Maybe a paperweight, and the shiny interior platters make good art projects. Basically, you need to make sure that the type of connection your hard drive supports corresponds to the type of connection that your computer can use. External drives usually use USB 2.0 or Firewire. If you’re computer only has one of these, don’t buy a drive made for the other. Windows computers usually have USB 2.0, but check your computer’s documentation.
Internal drives usually use either SCSI, SATA, or IDE. No, I’m not just putting random letters together. Each of these connection types are quite different, but for our purposes, we’ll just consider the availability of each.
It’s reasonable to assume that SATA drives will be widely accepted in the following years, so if you can, get one of these. At this time, though, SATA isn’t universal, so you’ll probably need an IDE drive. Most consumer motherboards use IDE; though SCSI is faster, it’s not too common. Again, you’re going to need to look at your computer’s documentation. Make sure that the drive you purchase hasn’t been used. A hard drive that has been in use has an exponentially higher failure rate than a new drive. After all, you don’t even know what they did with it.
Setting Up Your New Drive
Remember that once you buy your drive, you need to install it. Don’t worry; major manufacturers have clear, easy to follow instructions on how to set your new drive up. Be careful with your drive, and always discharge static electricity by grounding yourself before handling it. For external drives, you usually just need to install their drivers and/or software and plug them in; for desktop drives, you’ll need to open your computer; for laptop drives, you may need only to open a compartment, or you may need to take the whole device apart. If this is the case, it’s best to let someone with technical experience do this for you.