Day 2

 

    Today I decided to research the hard drive, the DVD ROM drive, and the CD burner.  I know I want to get at least a 40 gigabyte hard drive (maybe 60) because I have problems right now keeping my 13.6 gigabyte hard drive from filling up and I want to make sure I will not have that problem anymore.  I also want the hard drive to have a speed of 7200 RPM because I have a 5200 RPM drive right now and it takes a few seconds to load up sometimes.  For the DVD drive I will go with one that has a 16X speed, because I figure that I won't need anything more than that.  For the CD burner, however, I want the best one out there.  I want to be able to burn a CD the fastest I can without having to wait half an hour for it.  All of these factors will help me pick out the best drives for me today.

    I looked at several 60 gigabyte hard drives.  Several of them looked good and had the features I was looking for.  I found out that hard drives are a lot like mother boards in the fact that they are all pretty much the same with only some minor differences.  I also looked at some reviews for the drives to see how they worked for other people.  Looking at the transfer rate, access time, and disk speed, one drive stood out from the rest.  I decided to go with the 60GB EIDE ULTRA ATA-5 DESKSTAR 7200RPM 60GXP.  This drive will give me the capacity and speed that I want.

Sites used for reference:

javascript:opentechspecs(422788,1,1)

http://tomshardware.pricegrabber.com/rating_getprodrev.php/product_id=422788/id_type=M/ut=18c61fae7c754c97/

    For the DVD ROM drive I looked at the speeds and reliability, but it did not take much looking to find a good drive.  Since I wasn't looking for anything special (just the basic drive) I found a well-rounded drive that would work fine for me.  I decided to go with the Toshiba SD-M1612.  This drive has a DVD read speed of 16X and a CD read speed of 48X.  These speeds will be just fine for my uses.

Sites used for reference:

http://www.toshiba.com/taissdd/products/features/SDM1612-Over.shtml

http://www.epinions.com/content_63355195012

    Finally, I looked at CD burners.  There are many burners out there right now, but not all of them are the fastest.  I looked at several and one had great speed and great features: the Plexor PX-W4012TA/SW.  This burner has a burn speed of 40X, a read speed of 40X, and a rewrite speed of 12X, which is the fastest for all three specifications in any burners out today.  This burner also has BURN-Proof technology to eliminate buffer underrun errors and 120ms average random access time.  This will ensure disks that are written quickly and the elimination of buffer underrun errors means that I won't have to be throwing out any CDs because of the writer screwing up.  This seems to be the perfect burner for my new machine.

Sites used for reference:

http://www.enpc.com/cgi-bin/enpc/PX-W4012TA/SW.html

    Today I found that it's good to read reviews and find out if a certain component has worked well for someone else.  If it has, then it will probably work well for you.  In ever component I read a review on, most of them were in favor of them, even though there was one or two that were unfavorable, but that will happen with every component you read reviews on.  Now, I have full confidence in these drives because they have worked well for other people.