Building the Perfect Beast – Bell, whistle and other toys.

Now that we have the CPU, motherboard, and graphics card finished. Almost all the other choices are already decided. The above parts are the most expensive ones and the rest of my cash is going for little stuff. Hard drive prices are around $1 to 50 cents a gigabyte it seems silly to worry about cost now. I remember my first external SCSI drive of my Mac SE cost $525. That was a 20 MB hard drive and I thought that was huge! Now the sizes are so large and the drive so cheap you can pick a couple for $80 each just because you can. I’ve learned a few things building computer for my own use in the past few years, and I ‘m willing to share my person insights.

First you might think I brought a gaming hard drive, one of the really fast 10,000-rpm hard drives with 40 GB of memory. Nope. Those drive are nice, but most games I play the bottlenecks do not occur from getting information off the hard drive. I would think if I was playing or editing video off the drive that would be ideal, but I don’t have that problem. If I did use one of these drives I would make it a system core drive. I have found that having one drive complete dedicated to windows is the best way to go. The system core drive would also contain all the things like: drivers, updates, plug-ins, and application I uses everyday. All the caching happens on that drive, too. My theory is that all the system files on one drives speed up the daily task by a little bit. Games are on their own drive. Media files, pictures, mp3s, and video have their own drive too.

So the beast will have three drives: one 80 GB system core, 2 160 GB drives for Games and media files. The other advantages is if one drives goes bad, I can just pull the drive, wipe it or fix it while the other drives are unaffected. I suppose using a fast “game drive” as the system core would speed up things even more but I’m not spending four dollars a gigabyte for a smaller faster drive.

All the drives are Western Digital, because of the 8 - 16 MB of cache each drive has and the three-year warranty. Beside the hard drives, I need to add a few things beside just the now unless floppy drive.

On the optical side of the beast are two drives. The first one is a DVD-/+RW drive with Lightscribe^TM. Lightscribe^TM is that cool technology that let you write labels using the drive’s laser. I burn a lot of CDs and DVDs, but my labeling scheme leaves something to be desired. I figure all the stuff I really want to keep, I’ll put on a Lightscribe^TM disc and make a descent label. That way all my CD for my car aren’t label Booty Mix I, Booty Mix II, Booty Mix III…you get the picture. The thing that is just amazing is how little theses drives now cost, and the light scribe feature was just $10 than the going rate on a normal DVD burner. I’ve also added a CD-/+RW drive too. CD burner drives are so cheap now, why not added a second drive.

Now I know Blu-ray is coming out, but I can wait until the standard really takes off. They just started releasing games on DVD.

I guess this is pretty much it. The Breast should tide me over for the next couple of years, unless Cyberdyne comes out with the neural network chip.

(Note: This post is a little overdue. I have a confession to make. Two weeks ago I final got my teaching bonus cash for this semester. I order the parts, build the system, and now she sit next to my other PC. OMG! This is so cool! I will take pictures and put them in a later post.)