March 2004 Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 4

Storage

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

Current Cost: $446
Months on list: 2
Price Change: -$74

Serial ATA drives are continuing to make their mark on the performance side, 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 and RAID arrays, so it's only natural that we take advantage of both options in an extreme guide. We chose to go with a dual-disk 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.

For the second month in a row we are recommending a pair of the awesome Western Digital 74GB Raptor drives. Western Digital's Raptor drives are among the fastest SATA hardware on the market, with a blazingly fast 10,000 RPM spindle speed, 8MB of cache, and 74GBs of storage. The incredible speed increase is worth the smaller disk space, but at $223 apiece, these drives certainly won't be found in the bargain bin.

CD-ROM/DVD-RW: Pioneer 8X DVD+RW/-RW DVR-107D OEM

Cost: $116
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

With the recent announcement of dual-layer DVD recorders in the near future, prices of single layer 4.7GB DVD recorders have been drastically falling in price. For less than $125, including a DVD recorder just makes sense. Currently, the top of the line DVD recorders are running at 8X for DVD+/-R recording and the Pioneer DVR-107D is our DVD recorder of choice. This drive features 8X DVD+/-R burning along with 24X CD-R and 16X CDRW writing, which is fast enough that we no longer need to include a separate CD-RW burner. The OEM version can be found for a measly $116, which is an absolute bargain.

The Pioneer DVR-107D 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.