October Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 4

Storage

Two Western Digital 200GB SATA, 7200 RPM w/ 8-MB Cache

Current Cost: $376
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Serial ATA drives are becoming easier to find, and with prices comparable to those of standard Parallel ATA drives. Both our motherboards this month have support for Serial ATA drives and RAID arrays, so it's only natural that we take advantage of both options. We chose to setup two Western Digital 200GB 8-MB cache 7200RPM drives in a RAID 0 array for best performance. Should you rather want maximum data protection it's a good idea to setup the drives in RAID 1 mirroring as the second drive will act as an exact copy of the first, coming in very handy should the primary drive fail.

The Western Digital 200GB model is one of the highest capacity Serial ATA drives available, and it also comes with excellent performance. Western Digital's ultra high-end "Raptor" models offer even greater performance with a 10,000RPM spindle rate. Sadly, as of the time of this writing the highest capacity Raptor available was only 36.7GB. For this guide we needed something with a little more capacity, and dual WD 200GB drives certainly fit the bill.

CD-ROM/DVD-RW: Plextor PX-708A DVD-RW/+RW

Cost: $234
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

We've been looking to include a DVD burner for quite some time now, and it finally looks like we have found a model that lives up to our extreme expectations. The Plextor 8X DVD-RW/+RW DVD PX-708A drive has support for both competing formats (DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W) so you don't have to worry about which one will ultimately win. The drive is also one of the first to be able to burn a DVD+R at a whopping 8X, and a DVD-R at the standard 4X. In addition, the drive has a 2MB buffer along with an access time of less than 100ms. The drive is also bundled with Easy CD/DVD creator 6, Photosuite 5 SE, Roxio DVDMax Player, and Dantz Retrospect.

The Plextor PX-708A also comes in both black and beige faceplate models, thus allowing you mix and match according to the case and system color scheme.

CDRW: Lite On LTR-52327S - 52x32x52 CD-RW Drive

Current Cost: $36
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Because the DVD+/-RW drive we included this month does not have ultra high speed CD-RW burning capability, we decided to throw in our trusty Lite On 52X32X52X CDRW drive. A 52X CDR, 24X CDRW, and 52X Read drive is likely the fastest we are every going to see CD-RW drives burn at and until we see even faster DVD+/-RW drives even faster than they are today we're likely to continue to include it in this guide.

This model also comes in both black and beige color faceplate models, so you can mix and match based on your case choice.

Floppy Disk Drive: Generic 1.44 Floppy Disk Drive

Cost: $8

For those of you who still continue to cling onto the age-old technology of 1.44MB floppy disks we still include one in our extreme machine. Any old floppy drive will do, but we recommend that you get one with a black face plate if you're going for the "black case look" of the Cooler Master 201B.