- Choosing the CPU
- Choosing the CPU Fan
- Choosing the Hard Drive
- Choosing the Power Supply
- Personal Touches
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Choosing the Hard Drive
For the hard drive, I chose a Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM Serial ATA. This is a blazingly fast ATA hard drive that achieves SCSI speeds, but without the hassle of SCSI drives. This one is the smaller-capacity drive, limited to 36.7GB, but as I run a tight ship I generally won't use more than 50% of the space at any time. It has a full 8MB buffer and only a 2.99 ms average latency; the full specs are listed in Table 1.
You can't use slow, clunky IDE cables for this; for a high-performance drive you must use high-speed, rounded ATA cables. Instead of using the plain black cables that shipped with the mainboard, I chose an ultra blue UV reactive cable to show well against the UV lighting. We'll discuss aesthetic lighting and cabling in the next part of this series.
Table 1 Details of the Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM Serial ATA
|
General |
Rotational speed |
10,000 RPM (nominal) |
|
Buffer size |
8MB |
|
|
Average latency |
2.99 ms (nominal) | |
|
Contact start/stop cycles |
20,000 minimum | |
|
Seek times (average) |
Read seek time |
5.2 ms |
|
Track-to-track seek time |
0.7 ms | |
|
Full stroke seek |
10.2 ms |
Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM serial ATA cost: $92.