As the title suggests I have no idea what a Data Hard Drive is? Is is for backing up files in case of explosions from your HDD? The computer I am building now has the option to add one and I just have no idea if I should get one, or what the heck they are even for. I looked all over the internet and found nothing about them, so I hope someone else can help me out. Thankies! Kupo
I would assume that it's just another hard drive. I'm not sure why they would tack 'data' on to the front of, because all HDDs hold data - that's what their purpose is! You could copy and paste here the exact sentence they used, or a link to the website so we can go and see what they are trying to sell you.
iBUYPOWER Computer :: Chimera 4-M2 here is a random computer from their banner ad. the thing youre looking for is right below the Hard Drive section a little over halfway down the page.
Yeah it's just a secondary HDD that functions the same as the primary one, giving you more storage capacity.
What a lot of people do, particularly on Windows systems, is use their primary drive exclusively for installing their applications. All the data (Word docs, spreadsheets, stored pics, emails, databases, anything else involving any sort of data) is stored on a separate data drive. There are several sensible reasons for this. For one thing, if you get a major virus or trojan or some sort of drive corruption that requires you to reformat your drive and reload your OS, you don't have to worry about losing data if you have it all stored on a separate data drive. Additionally, as Nat3 said, you can also use the data drive to make a backup (or even an image) of the system data on your boot drive so that if you have a virus or failure, it's easy to restore. And for some applications, they will run slightly faster if the data drive is separate from the drive where the applications reside.
