CNET's desktop buying guide
Find the drives you need to succeed
First, decide how big and fast a hard drive (or drives) you need. For
example, if you plan on working with large video files as you make your way to
Hollywood, spend the extra money on a large drive or two. Filmmakers will also
want to be sure to invest in a DVD-recordable drive, and music downloaders will
definitely want to include a CD burner.
Options: Hard drives | Optical
drives  Hard drives
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Hard drive<
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Following the
proliferation of digital media content has been an increase in hard drive size.
Only four or five years ago, a 20GB hard drive wasn't unusual, whereas the
smallest drive you'll find on a PC sold today is 80GB. For mainstream PCs, the
norm is a 80GB or 250GB drive. Power users such as DV editors who need to store
large video files can opt for a 300GB or 500GB hard drive (or two). Most desktop
drives spin at 7,200rpm (the faster a drive spins, the faster you can access its
data), and Western Digital has come out with a 10,000rpm drive.
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Serial ATA cable and IDE
cable< div> | Most performance systems we've seen recently come with one or more
SATA drives. With two or more hard drives, many power users will use a RAID 0
configuration. RAID 0 (redundant array of independent disks), also called
data striping, doesn't actually offer any redundancy, but it improves
performance by striping data across the drives. The PC sees the drives as one
drive and can break apart portions of a file and distribute them to the
different drives, which speeds the reading and writing process. A RAID 1
configuration, or disk mirroring, is less popular in desktops. It doesn't
offer a performance boost, but it gives you peace of mind by copying your data
to both drives simultaneously so that, if one of the drives fails, your work
won't be lost.
Optical drives
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Optical drive<
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We recommend
including at least a DVD writer drive in a PC at any price level. The
fastest DVD burner can write to DVDs at 16X speed and rewrite to DVD RWs at 8X
speed.
The DVD-recordable picture is a little complicated,
with many standards supported by different groups of companies. In one corner,
there is the DVD Forum, which supports the "minus" R or "dash" R format and
counts among its supporters Hitachi, Panasonic, and Toshiba. In the other corner
sits the DVD+RW Alliance, whose members include Dell, HP, Ricoh, and Yamaha.
Some companies, such as Philips and Sony, support both formats. Lucky for you,
many drives now support both formats and even yet another format,
DVD-RAM, which can be useful for regular data backup.
According to the latest street prices, DVD writer drives generally cost between
S$70 (US$51.54)
and S$150 (US$110.44)
. The next generation of optical drives, Blu-ray and HD DVD, are just starting to appear. However, their current high prices and uncertainty over which format will become dominant makes it impractical to reccommend for now.
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