Which Hard Disks For Your computer System?

Not much thought needs to go into this one. Generally for a business computer, hard disk size on a workstation is not that critical because if you are managing your information correctly, it should all be located on the server.

Currently a 160GB hard disk is the most cost effective for a workstation.
There is no real option for high performance disks in a business computer unless they are custom made. The standard speed is 7200rpm although you can get a high performance desktop drive from Western Digital called a Velociraptor, these come in 150GB and 300GB and are about 3 to 4 times the price of a standard disk of similar size.

PC's used by graphics designers and other high power users would benefit from having the high performance 10,000 rpm desktop disks installed, for a standard day to day office duties it is however overkill.

Defragmenting The Hard Drive, worth it?
No, this is a common misconception. Defragmentation on modern hard disks is a waste of time, it will make no difference to the performance of your hard disk and it certainly will not fix problems your computer is having.

Windows operating systems are multi tasked meaning that even if you had a perfectly defragmented system (every single file was whole and in a contiguous format) half way through one task, another 23 tasks have grabbed some of the disk time meaning that the hard disk spindle has had to move all over the place anyway, completely defeating the purpose of a defragmentation of your disk.

A strategy that will have far more impact than defragmenting your hard disk, is to ensure that the free space on the hard disk never dips below 40%