Buyer's Guide: High End System - July 2004

Hard Drives

Recommended: Dual Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA in RAID 0 Configuration
Price: $376 shipped

There are genuine performance advantages to a SATA RAID array, and a RAID 0 Array with two of the fastest SATA drives that you can buy makes for a blistering high end system. The storage capacity for two 74GB WD Raptor drives is a generous, but rational, 148GB of fast access storage. Compared to SCSI RAID solutions with similar performance, the Raptor RAID is a virtual bargain. The 74GB Raptors have double the storage of the legendary 36.7GB Raptors, an increase in speed, and the same 8MB buffer. We are also pleased to see a price drop in the 74GB Raptors of almost $50 for the pair this month.

The 5-year warranty for the Raptor drives makes this investment in high-speed storage a little easier to handle. All drives will fail at some point because they have moving parts, but you have warranty reassurance for 5 years that attest to the quality of these WD Raptor hard drives. Previously, 10,000RPM speeds or a 5-year warranty were features only found on enterprise/SCSI drives, but they have now reached our high end system desktop.

All of the High End recommended and alternative motherboards have built-in capabilities for SATA RAID, so it is relatively easy to enjoy this level of RAID performance. Those concerned more about data security than ultimate speed can configure the drives as RAID 1, or mirroring. In RAID 1, the drive capacity will only be 74GB, but you will have the assurance of a mirrored drive in the event of drive failure.


Alternative: Seagate ST3200822A (200GB) Baracuda 7200RPM (8MB cache)
Price: $130 shipped

While IDE drives, including our alternate Seagate Barracuda 200GB, are not as fast as the Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM SATA drives, they are still plenty fast for most applications. Seagate offers the same 8MB cache as the Raptor drives and very large 200GB storage capacity for a small $133 price. While the well-known Seagate drives offer impressive specifications, the most important feature of the Seagate 200GB is not something that you can see. With hard drive manufacturers reducing warranties to one year, the Seagate 200GB still carries a 3-year manufacturers warranty. With Seagate delivering hard drive capacities at 66 cents per Gigabyte, this drive also delivers excellent value.

If 200GB seems a massive amount of storage, it will be just what the doctor ordered for users of Digital Cameras, Digital Video, and digital music storage. Those are the reasons why you want this High End system, right? You certainly don't need this kind of power to write the great American novel or handle emails.

We will be looking at SATA alternatives that support NCQ in future Buyer's Guides. If you prefer a SATA solution, there are excellent choices with a SATA interface instead of IDE. However, we see no real reason to recommend a SATA drive over IDE unless there are features like RAID or NCQ or warranty that make the SATA a better performer. There is also no reason not to choose SATA if you prefer the narrow cables, but please keep in mind that SATA connectors are still very fragile and more easily broken than the admittedly bulky, but durable, IDE connector.

Optical

Recommendation: NuTech DDW-082 8X DVD+/-R/RW OEM/Retail
Price: $65/73 shipped

The winner of the recent AnandTech Dual 8X roundup was the inexpensive NuTech DDW-081 DVD burner, and the 082 is basically a slight update of the same DVD burner. The NuTech proved to be one of the fastest, most reliable, and most flexible DVD dual-8X burners on the market. It is also very affordable and an easy choice for our High End Buyer's Guide. The latest optical drives really can do everything optical, with both high-speed DVD and high-speed CD burning.

This month, the price of the NuTech dropped even further to a very reasonable $65 for OEM and $73 Retail. The only reason to buy the Retail instead is if you need the Nero Burning software included in the retail version. If you don't already have it, $8 more for Nero and a DVD player is a good deal.

Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on storage from many different reputable vendors:





If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.