Which Hard drive is better?

I can't really tell you which hard drive(brand) is better now as most of them works great today.


But I must tell you several tips when you buy hard drives for E521.

1. E521 supports only two internal hard drives.

2. The size of the internal hard drive should be 3.5 inch ones.

3. The internal hard drive should be SATA or SATA II and not IDE Hard drive. (Sata is the abbreviation of Serial AT attachment)

4. The amount of RPM (spin Rate Per Minute) is not that important today. Lower 5400 rpm works as equal as 7200 rpm today. Of course, the higher RPM is better but those ones usually produce a lot of heat.

It is better to pick the lower rpm to avoid the heat and the noise as much as possible because you can not put the Hard drive cooler in E521.

5. Lower capacity of the Hard drive is generally faster to fetch data with less noise regardless of the RPM. E521 can support 1TB and more of hard drive on each slot.

6. Avoid unknown brand to avoid the faulty hard drive.


I personally have this 1TB Sumsung Spin Point F1 . and in the second slot, i have Seagate Barracuda 11. 7200.

They are quite cheap now and working tremendously well.

If you would like to check the temperature of the Hard disks, there is a good little software called HD tune. This software also checkes the average disk speed of yours. It is quite handy.


In E521, the hard disk temperature rises if your front fan is not pushing the hot airs toward the back properly and if your Graphic card is producing a lot of heat.

My hard disk once went up to 65C. Your hard disk temperatue mustn't go over 69C for safety reasons. But, I really must say that this kind of temperature is not acceptable unless you are in the situation where this kind of temperature is not avoidable.

Generally, Hard disks operate around 40C and 50C.

Mine operates around the temperature shown above.

In order to avoid the heat, you must do the followings:

1. You must use a good defragmenter such as Iobit Smart Defrag to Defragment thoroughly the scattered sector and data on the hard disk to avoid it spinning all the time.

2. Please go back to the table of content and configure your RAMDisk. This method also avoids the frequent writing on the hard drive. It is small, but still does the job.

3. Please turn off your Windows automatic scheduled defragmenting.

4. Please defrag your registry. There is a good one called Free Registry Defrag.

I will update this part if new method comes up to me.




Lastly, you need a Data Cable. Yes, the one that connects the hard drive and the motherboard.
But you only need it if you are intending to put one more internal hard drive in E521 as you already have one for your current hard drive right now.

As you already know, E521 accepts the ''right angled data cable'' such as this one. And it has to be around 50 - 60cm otherwise, the cable can't reach the bottom internal hard drive slot in E521.

It is really expensive to get this cable from Dell website but you might probably find a good one near your computer shop. Just tell them that you need a right angled SATA data Cable that is around 60cm.

Also, although i have shown you the example of the right angled data cable above, the other end of the cable doesn't have to be right angled as well. It is better that the other end of the cable (where you connect that to the motherboard), is straight rather than right angled.

So one end should be (small, preferably) right angled and the other end should be straight.

Dell offer the 30CM of this so please don't confuse. What you need is the longer cable.

I can't give you the exact link of the Dell Website since you might be living in other country.

But I can give you the exact example of what you should get. This is the one and it is cheaper than the dell ones.




External hard drive is the best solution for keeping movies and photos. You can even store the important files before you do something weird on your computer. OH by the way, please don't use the windows backup. It won't function properly as you expect.
You can even turn off your external hard drive anytime to avoid the heat problems.


I will update this article if anything comes up. Thank you.