Whether you need it to store your movies and music, for a server or to keep surveillance footage, a 3.5″ hard drive will cover you needs. Hard drives give you the additional storage needed to store all your files. 3.5″ hard drives are the usual size for internal hard drives. While it’s typically a pretty straightforward process, selecting the best hard drive for your situation will give you one that is both reliable and works best for your needs.

Depended on the intended use, certain hard drives may work better than others. If you’re looking for hard drives to run a server, then the Western Digital Green line of hard drives work well. They offer a variety of capacity options ranging from 500GBs all the way up to 6TBs per hard drive. They feature heavily reduced power consumption and have IntelliPower and IntelliSeek built in, letting them read and write files on the drive quick and quietly all with reduced power consumption.

If you’re looking for a hard drive to use in a new computer or to add additional storage to an existing computer, then Seagate’s Barracuda hard drives or Western Digital’s Blue lineup are what you’re looking for. Seagate’s Barracuda and Western Digital’s Blue line of hard drives offer an RPM of 7200 for quick file accessibility. They also have 64MBs of cache, which lets the hard drive access your files faster.

If you’re going to install Windows 10 on your new hard drive, you should also keep in mind that Windows will only install on hard drives with at least 16GBs of storage and not on hard drives over 2TBs.

Western Digital’s Black line of hard drives is great for gamers, video and photo editors and others needing to access large files continuously and quickly, featuring even faster read and write times than the Blue series. These range from 1TB – 6TBs in size.

Finally, if you’re looking for a hard drive for a NAS or to work for extended periods of time, then Western Digital’s Red line of hard drives or Hitachi’s Deskstar NAS lineup is great for this. These drives are made to run 24/7 and have great reliability and build quality.

Whether you need a new 3.5″ hard drive to store files, download all your games on or put inside a server, you’re sure to find the one that suits your needs here.