Hi, I am building a rig and wondering how much hard drive I need. I know I'll get at least 500Gig but is that enough - I'll be running a q9550, with 8gigram, gtx9800 vid card, vista 64 - any comments would be great : ) cost is less important than eliminating performance lag from not enough hard drive...

dude, i have 160gb on my newly built pc (less than 1 month old) and ive only used 43% of the space, most of it is just game demos though as well as my collection of games. I've also loaded my pc with the usual set of apps (productivity software, itunes, antivirus, etc) I'd think you'd be fine with a 500GB, u wouldnt have to worry about space.

Hitachi's P7K500 is $67 at Ewiz.

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=H [...] 0b4367f8f9

More storage than you'll need for gaming, with high platter density giving good performance. Anandtech did a HDD round up awhile ago and this drive performed near the top of all drives tested.

It depens what are You going to store on HDD. I have 74GB and 750GB drives in mine and it is too little. If You store lot of HD video and uncompressed video as transferred from camera it really takes up lot of space. If it is only for applications and not storeage 500GB is more than needed. In that case I would say 320GB fastest drive is the way to go

Thanks everyone, that's a good point about HD video, hadn't thought of that - I do have a lot of photos, and I will probably store a lot of downloaded movies (maybe not HD yet), will probably go for 500gig and upgrade if I need it later, thanks again : )