May Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 4

Storage

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

Current Cost: $410
Months on list: 3
Price Change: -$36

As Serial ATA drives slowly but surely push the Parallel ATA drives out of the market, we have followed suit and upgraded both our High End and Extreme Buyer's Guides over to SATA. As the Intel and AMD systems have support for Serial ATA RAID, it's only natural that we take full advantage of that again this month. As this system is built for speed, we like to take advantage of a dual-disk RAID 0 array for added performance. For the more safety conscious, a RAID 1 mirroring array is another option, the second drive acts as a mirror if the first one should fail keeping your precious data safe.

Currently, there is no better Serial ATA drive than the Western Digital 74GB Raptor, and two running in RAID 0 is even better. 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. With only 74GBs of storage, and priced at $205 each these drives are very expensive, but certainly worth it for the extra performance.

For those who want a little more space with their hard disk selection, we recommend dual 250-GB Western Digital 7200 RPM 8-MB SATA drives. These are priced at just under $200 a piece, so are about equivalent in cost to the Raptor, while offering 500-GB striped or 250-GB mirrored capacity levels at a slight drop in performance.

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

Cost: $93
Months on list: 2
Price Change: -$23

With the announcement of dual-layer DVD recorders hitting the market in the very near future, prices of single layer 4.7GB DVD recorders have been falling drastically in price. For less than $100, including a DVD recorder just makes sense, and these are an incredible deal right. 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 24X 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 $93, 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.