January Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 4

Storage

Two Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA, 10000 RPM w/8-MB Cache

Current Cost: $520
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Serial ATA drives are continuing to make their mark, and we're slowly phasing out the Parallel ATA IDE drives from our more high-end guides. Both Intel and AMD motherboards have support for Serial ATA drives and RAID arrays, so it's only natural that we take advantage of both options in an extreme guide. We chose to use two Western Digital 74GB Raptor drives this month setup in a RAID 0 array for extra performance. Should you rather have maximum data protection, it's a good idea to set up the drives in a RAID 1 mirroring array, where the second drive acts as a mirror if the first one should fail.

The Western Digital 74GB Raptor drives are currently among the highest performance consumer hard drives on the market and feature an incredibly fast 10,000 RPM spindle speed, along with an 8MB cache and 74GBs of storage space. The speed increase is worth the slightly-lower disk space, but at $260 apiece, these drives certainly don't come cheap.

CD-ROM/DVD-RW: NEC 8X DVD+RW/-RW ND-2500A OEM

Cost: $121
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Prices for DVD+/-RW Drives have been dropping rapidly over the past few months, just as write speeds have been increasing. Rather than go with the more expensive Plextor in the previous guide, we opted instead for the less expensive, but high performing NEC ND-2500A. The drive features 8X DVD+/-R burning along with 32X CD-R and 16X CDRW writing, which is fast enough that we no longer need to include a separate CD-RW burner. The drive also has a 2MB buffer, and can be mounted vertically or horizontally.

The NEC ND-2500A also comes in both black and beige faceplate models, thus allowing you mix and match according to the case and system color scheme.

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 sticking to a known brand like Panasonic, Sony or similar.