SSD, Hard Drive, And Optical Drive
System Drive: Mushkin Chronos Deluxe MKNSSDCR240GB-DX
Drive guru Andrew Ku tells us that the 240 GB Chronos Deluxe is the best value in storage performance. Rather than argue, this builder took that recommendation as a great reason to step up to a higher capacity point than the previous build's 128 GB m4.
Read Customer Reviews of Mushkin's Chronos Deluxe 240 GB
A SandForce SF-2281 controller helps push this drive superb sequential read and write rates over 500 MB/s over its SATA 6Gb/s interface. Of course, that’s just a theoretical maximum.
Mass Storage: Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003
Now that the price of high-capacity drives is tumbling back towards what we were used to last year, we were able to get a 1.5 TB unit for only $100. We weren't able to secure that amount of storage space from a high-performance model, though.
Read Customer Reviews of Seagate's Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5 TB Hard Drive
Instead we ordered Seagate’s low-energy, 5900 RPM green drive. This is the repository we’d use to store photos, movies, and other things that don’t get moved much. Lower noise should accompany the slower spindle speed and stepped-back power consumption. All of that is fine; performance isn’t a big priority for the type of files we want to store here, and we already have that 240 GB SSD to help hold speed-sensitive apps.
Optical Storage: Pioneer BDR-206DBKS
We’ve seen so many bare drives come with a software bundle that we were a little surprised when our previous build's BD-RE really came with nothing other than hardware. Not willing to take that chance again, we ordered a white-box drive that we knew would include software used to access the media a Blu-ray-capable product supports.
Read Customer Reviews of Pioneer's BDR-206DBKS
We didn’t buy the drive primarily for playing movies, but we’d be disappointed if we couldn’t. Pioneer’s BDR-206DBKS gives us 12x BD-R, 2x BD-RE, and 16x DVD-R writes, plus CyberLink’s Media Suite 8, for under $100.
Our goal was to get the best range of optical media support, and with 50 GB dual-layer discs selling for as little as $10 each, this drive could become the perfect place to dump backups.
