Find the desktop drives you need to succeed

The CNET editors' guide to desktops clues you in to what you need to know, from finding the type of PC that fits your lifestyle to catching up on all of the latest trends.

First, decide how big and fast a hard drive (or drives) you need. For example, if you plan to work with large video files as you make your way to Hollywood, spend the extra money on a large drive or two. Filmmakers will also want to be sure to invest in a DVD-recordable drive, and music downloaders will definitely want to include a CD burner.

Options: Hard drives | Optical drives | Blu-ray and HD DVD: The new optical generation

Hard drives

Following the proliferation of digital media content has been an increase in hard drive size. Only four or five years ago, a 2GB hard drive wasn't unusual, whereas the smallest drive you'll find on a PC sold today is 100GB. For mainstream PCs, the norm is a 250GB or 300GB drive. Power users such as DV editors who need to store large video files can opt for a 400GB or 500GB hard drive or two, all the way up to 2TB (that's terabytes). Most desktop drives spin at 7,200rpm--the faster a drive spins, the faster you can access its data--and both Western Digital and Seagate have come out with 10,000rpm drives, though their storage capacity is somewhat limited at 150GB.

Most performance systems we've seen come with two or more Serial ATA hard drives. With multiple drives, many power users will use a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 (redundant array of independent disks), also called data striping, doesn't actually offer any redundancy, but it improves performance by distributing data across both drives. The PC sees the drives as one drive and can break apart portions of a file and distribute the parts to the different drives, which speeds the reading and writing process. A RAID 1 configuration, or disk mirroring, is less popular in desktops, although Dell offers it in its desktops the form of its DataSafe feature. RAID 1 doesn't offer a performance boost, but it gives you peace of mind by copying your data to both drives simultaneously so that if one of the drives fails, your work won't be lost.

Optical drives

Like CD burners of a few years ago, DVD burners have finally come down in price. We're almost to the point where DVD burners are universal because they've become so affordable. Choosing a DVD burner used to be complicated, thanks to competing DVD-recordable formats, but it's now much simpler, thanks to the dawn of the dual-layer, multiformat drive, which can use virtually every type of DVD media. You won't find every budget PC with a DVD burner (in which case you should at least get a 52X CD-RW drive); every system that does have one should be multiformat. If a system you're looking at has an old DVD+ or DVD- specific drive, skip it.

Blu-ray and HD DVD: The new optical generation

Blu-ray and HD-DVD are primarily referred to in terms of set-top boxes for watching prerecorded video discs (the PlayStation 3 game console also sports a Blu-ray drive), but both formats are also available to PC users, and have some promising potential as storage mediums.

Sony's Blu-ray drives are capable of storing 25GB of data (or 50GB on dual-layer discs). HD DVD was developed by Toshiba, and its discs store 15GB of data (30GB on dual-layer discs). By comparison, a typical single-layer DVD is 4.7GB. We're also starting to see combination drives that incorporate both Blu-ray and HD DVD capabilities.

Blank media is expensive, around $15 per disc, and burning speeds are stuck at 2X for the current generation, so it may be some time before one of these two competing formats becomes a clear winner in the public eye. Prices will drop eventually, but for now, expect to pay a hefty premium for adding one of these drives to your system--an IDE Blu-ray burner can cost upward of $750.

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