There’s never been more choice for those looking to buy a hard drive. There are standard hard drives, SSD and now hybrid drives that combine both SSD and a regular drive in one.

First take a look here to see Avid’s hard drive requirements

Then you need to weigh up the following.

How much space you need
How fast you want your drive to be
How much money you have

You won’t be surprised that if you want a lot of 1 and 2 then you need a lot more of 3.

SSD drives are fast, but not cheap, especially if you want a lot of space, for example a 512gb Crucial SSD is around £500 ($800), whereas for that kind of money you could get 2 x 3TB 7200rpm Seagate drives, or any other good drive for that matter. There are hybrid drives, but the jury is still out on them and reviews haven’t been that favourable.

A couple of things to consider.

As most Macs and PCs have room for more than one drive you can get the best of both worlds by having an SSD as your system drive and a standard drive for your media. That’s the system I have, in fact I have an SSD drive for system, then 3 x standard drives for Sessions, Samples and Video.
Pro Tools 10 HD gave us Timeline Cache, which in fact means that the speed of your drive is far less important. I tested this when Pro Tools 10 first came out and ran a session from my Apple Time Capsule over Wifi to see if it would work and it did.

However, some of you will be on a limited budget and will not have HD, so you need to make sure you choose one good drive, except one thing - you should always try and have a dedicated drive for your media.

So here are the things you should make sure of

7200rpm speed
As much space as you can afford
A known brand - your creative efforts are too precious to trust to a cheap Ebay knock-off, especially when you can buy a quality product for less than £100.

Shop around and you can get a bargain - for example I got a 3TB Seagate Barracuda for £108 on Ebay last week.