Desktops Buying Guide
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What you need to know, from the kind of user you are to current technologies:
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 to work with large video files as you direct 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.
Hard drives
Hard drive
The proliferation of digital media content has led to a dramatic increase in hard drive sizes. Only four or five years ago, a 2GB hard drive wasn't unusual, whereas the smallest drive you'll find on a PC sold today is 20GB. For mainstream PCs, the norm is a 60GB or 80GB drive. Power users such as DV editors who need to store large video files can opt for a 200GB or 250GB hard drive (or two), all the way up to 400GB. Most desktop drives spin at 7200rpm (the faster a drive spins, the faster you can access its data), and both Western Digital and Seagate have released a 10,000rpm drive, though their storage capacity is somewhat limited at 72GB.
Serial ATA cable and IDE cable
A couple of years ago, we saw the introduction of a new hard drive interface. Called Serial ATA (SATA), it offers a faster connection between the processor and the hard drive than the older Ultra ATA interface did. SATA cables are also smaller than Ultra ATA cables, which allows for better airflow inside the case. In our testing to date, however, we haven't seen much of a performance boost with SATA drives, but at this point it's become nearly universal. If you buy a new PC that doesn't have Serial ATA hard drives, you know you're buying a fairly outdated configuration.
Most performance systems we've seen come with two or more SATA drives. With multiple 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
Optical drive
Like CD burners a few years ago, DVD burners are really coming down in price. We recommend including at least a CD-RW drive in a PC at any price level; it's almost to the point where a DVD burner is a requisite in all but budget-class systems. The fastest CD burner can write to CD-Rs at 52X speed and rewrite to CD-RWs at 24X speed. Some CD-RW drives can also play DVDs; these are commonly referred to as DVD/CD-RW combo drives.
The DVD-recordable picture is more complicated, with different standards supported by different groups of companies. In one corner, there is the DVD Forum, which supports the 'minus' or 'dash' R (DVD-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. Luckily for you, many drives now support both formats, along with the new double-layer discs, which hold up to 8.5GB of data, or enough for an uncompressed film. Yet another format to look out for is DVD-RAM, which can be useful for regular data backup.
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