Another Post…

SSD: Solid-State Drive.  Doesn’t have quite the ring to it as hard disk drive I.M.O.  but get used to it, they’re coming, and they’re here to stay.  Believe it or not, hard drive disks are quite a bit older than personal computers.  And while most components in PCs have evolved many times throughout their history, the architecture of a HDD has stayed pretty much the same since its conception.  Well, a change is beginning to occur, and it’s going to be to drives what multiple cores were to computing: the Solid-State Drive.  These new drives have already become very popular on technology sites and blogs, because they don’t rely on any physically moving parts, which makes them much faster and durable than our current drives that use a mechanical arm to track and read a spinning disk to retrieve data.  SSDs are being adopted by the hardcore users, and if you own a netbook, chances are that it contains a SSD.  SATA ports simply can’t keep up with the I/O power of SSD’s, and I believe that soon a new port will be added to motherboards which will allow higher read/write speeds.  Already manufacturers are building SSDs that connect via pci-e to get around the limitations of SATA.  The biggest obstacle in the adoption of SSD as a standard is price, and capacity.  I have been closely monitoring the prices of SSDs since they entered the market, and the strides they have been making in both of these categories is remarkable.  Now with the advent of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, which both promise better SSD support, it is a more enticing time than ever to upgrade.  I set out to introduce  the Super Talent RAID Drive but instead I wrote a little opinion piece.  I would still strongly reccomend it, or any SSD that is connected via pci-e, because of the higher input and output, which is what your buying it for anyways aren’t you? Oh and the title? Just read the post below.

Mass Storage

With movies and games becoming more graphically intense, the file sizes have sky-rocketed into the multiple Gigabyte (GB) range. This means of course, that if you want to have a bunch of High-Definition movies, games, etc. on your computer, you will need a lot of storage, and the good folks at Western Digital (WD) have you covered. WD’s new hard drive (HDD) has surpassed Seagate’s 1.5 Terabyte (TB = 1,024GB) and just released a 2TB HDD! Now that’s a lot of storage for one HDD! This Serial-ATA (SATA) HDD has 32MB cache, 5400 rpm, and a new feature called “Intelliseek.” (There is a great video provided by WD (linked below) so you can visualize this feature) Intelliseek is a technology that the HDD uses to calculate the most efficient means to travel between two spots on the HDD, thus resulting is less power consumption and less vibration from the HDD itself!

However, if you want super lightning fast IO (read/write) speeds, this HDD is not for you. It does have enough IO speed for the average user, but if you want truly super lightning fast speeds, you will want a Solid State Disk (SSD) (basically a hard drive with no moving parts, it is a very fast, albeit expensive, on-board flash drive, but SDD’s are another post…)

Now for some math:

This HDD is pretty expensive looking at GB/dollar (2048GB/$300 = 6.82GB/$ compared to Seagate’s 1.5 TB: 1536BG/$130 = 11.8GB/$), so in my opinion, I would either go with a pair of Seagate HDD’s (2 Seagate 1.5TB HDD’s-totaling 3TB-from Newegg.com cost $260, while one 2TB WD HDD costs $300 from Newegg) or just wait until the price drops (like everything does in the world of computers).

Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL040709&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL040709-_-HardDrives-_-LC3B-_-22136344

Western Digital 2TB product website: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=576

Western Digital home page: http://www.wdc.com/en/

-Da DreamBuild Crew

Cheap (relatively) storage!

Are you looking for a lot of hard drive (HDD) space, with pretty solid read/write speeds and don’t want to destroy your bank account? The new Seagate Barracuda Serial-ATA (SATA) has 1.5 terabytes of storage space (that’s 1,500 gigabytes!) with 32 megabytes for cache and 43% power savings. If you have heard of this baby, you might have also heard that there have been some issues with the drive involving firmware (kind of a mix between hardware and software). People have experienced read/write lock-ups, the drive would time-out and basically stop functioning, and broken windows (from throwing the drives out the window).

HOWEVER!! This problem has all been resolved, and Seagate is now pumping out the same reliable HDD’s that they have been doing for years. I picked myself up one of these drives from Newegg.com (where else, right?) and have been pleasantly surprised with its performance. I upgraded from two Western Digital (WD) HDD’s with 16MB cache (from my very first build), and I definitely noticed an increase in read/write speeds as well as decreased boot times. These puppies are (currently) $130 with free shipping on Newegg.com (click on the picture to check it out).

This drive gets the DreamBuild’s stamp of approval!

Great Deal

Newegg is easily my favorite Etail store.  Today they have a XFX Geforce GTX260 and a Seagate Barracuda 640GB Hard Drive for $200 (After a $30 mail in rebate).  Newegg is even throwing in a 4GB Flash drive to sweeten the deal.  Not that any of these things really belong in a Dream Build, they do fit very comfortably in a very respectable build.  Those GTX260s are more than capable for the hardcore crowd.  Given a shout out to SlickDeals.net for the heads up!

GTX260 + 640GB HDD + 4GB Flash Drive for $200.