6. Build Your Own Computer: Drives and OS

Drives: Harddrives (HDD)

Hard drive space is your friend.  Today music, games, and video take up enormous amounts of space.  Luckily hard drives today are large and relatively inexpensive. For most uses 250GB is what you should aim for; 80GB will suffice if you do not save large amounts of music, videos and games on your computer.

You have two choices in interface on your motherboard SATA and IDE.  There is currently a misleading and confusing naming system for the next version of SATA; SATA II. See anandtech for more information. For future proofing sake it's better to get an SATA I or SATA II drive.  It also currently offers slightly better performance and better ventilation because of the shape of the cable it uses.  However if you have an older IDE drive you want to use in your new system your performance won't suffer much at all. 

More drive cache is always better aim for at least 4MB, better to have 8MB; 16MB is even better.  The cache speeds up how fast the drive can access information.  Also make sure the rotational speed is at least 7200RPM.

Good places to look for Hard Drives include: Western Digital (WD), Seagate,  and Hitachi.

Drives: Optical

Here the choice is pretty simple.  DVD-RW Dual layer drives are so cheap that it doesn't make sense not to get one.  Only if you are transferring drives from an older system (to save a little money) should you not get one.  The preference is again SATA, but as said earlier it's not a whole lot of difference performance wise.  Look for a drive that burns DVD-R's at 16x and has at least a ATA-66 interface (for IDE) or an SATA interface.

Within a few years there should be a new standard optical disk.  Currently HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Discs are fighting for superiority after a failed single standard. These two discs offer similar storage capacities (starting at about 50GB) but are not compatible with each other (Similar to VHS vs. Betamax).  In the end neither of these may succeed, holographic discs that offer higher storage capability and higher transfer rates may win in the long run.  However, a DVD drive will suffice, and you should wait till one standard shows it's superiority before buying.

OS

Currently you have four major choices.  Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD/NetBSD, and Mac OS X.  Didn't know you had that many?, join the club.

Windows XP ( in Home and Professional forms) is currently the most popular home OS.  Mostly because people learned how to use a computer on it.  The main advantages, familiarity and the sheer amount of software that runs on it.  Disadvantages are that it costs $$, is somewhat insecure, and is somewhat unstable.  Also, if you ever want to actually learn anything about how a computer works, you're pretty much out of luck unless you want to spend $$$$. A side note: there is currently no reason NOT to install Service Pack 2, if you haven't its a good idea. I currently use Windows XP Home SP2 as my main box, because I've found it to be most productive.  However, I also use many open source programs such as The GIMP (similar to Photoshop), OpenOffice, and Firefox.

Linux is free and is all that is good in the world. (Well... maybe not all).  For the serious enthusiast, for the light computer user, and for the people who want to save money, this is a good choice to look into.  Linux is, as said before, free in most its distributions (versions), but it doesn't have the supporting software behind windows. If you haven't used Linux yet, I suggest ordering a free live cd (which does not install any software on your computer, i.e. its risk free) from Ubuntu or Kubuntu.  Its completely free, even shipping is covered. On a side note, the color scheme of this site was partly inspired by Kubuntu and Ubuntu.

FreeBSD and NetBSD, free, and similar to Linux, however not as popular, but they offer some unique features.  I would suggest checking out Linux first before going into FreeBSD or NetBSD.

Both Linux and *BSD are based on the extremely stable and capable Unix.

Recently, Apple ported it's OS X operating system to the x86 processor architecture, meaning you should be able to run it on a PC. However, support is limited, partly because of questionable legality and a strong(er) linux base on PCs.

Kevin C. October 7th 2005 kcas88@gmail.com

- Updated Nov. 3rd 2005
- Updated Dec. 2nd 2005
- Updated Apr. 12th 2006

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