Memory, Hard Drive, And Optical Drive
The price of memory continues to rise, but Crucial's 6GB triple-channel memory kit continues to provide sweet low-latency overclockable memory at a relatively low price.
Read Customer Reviews of Crucial's 6GB DDR3-1333 Memory Kit
We might have gotten away with 3GB of RAM, but for $165, it doesn't hurt to have twice that capacity under the hood.
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB
Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Caviar Black 750GB
A single drive is more cost-effective than a RAID setup, and a striped RAID array won’t offer a perceptible performance increases for the typical user. Of course, a redundant array is appealing for data protection, but frankly, we're not sure the extra expenditure would provide tangible performance benefits in the kind of desktop applications we'll be running.
We continue to opt for Western Digital's Caviar Black series as a fast and reliable single-drive solution. But this time we've upped the ante to the 750GB flavor instead of the 640GB model we've selected in the past. Hard disk prices continue to drop, and now $80 buys you this drive with three-quarters of a terabyte on tap.
Optical Drive: OEM Samsung SH-S223C CD/DVD Burner SATA
Read Customer Reviews of Samsung's SH-S223C
For $20, how can you lose when purchasing a name-brand optical drive? The OEM Samsung model SH-S223C delivers 22x DVD+R write speeds and a 2MB cache, but most importantly it does everything we expect it to do.