Tuesday , 6 August Galal Omar

This is the third of our articles on building your “Crazy but Cool” computer. It may only be a fantasy, but in the first two
articles we explored choosing a motherboard and CPU for a maximum speed gaming machine. Then we looked at cases
and power supplies. This week we consider storage devices.

Get lots of storage tablets. They are also very fast as they use SSDs are said to slow down rapidly when
flash memory. The disadvantage of them they have made a lot of writes to the disc.
Ribbon connectors and daisy chaining is that they are much more expensive Controllers are being developed to “level”
your devices! There is another choice you than mechanical hard disc drives. the wear and they are now said to be
will have to make. SATA2 is being replaced better at keeping to their original
by SATA3 – twice as fast data transfer! So, One choice you might make is to use a
incredible speed. Hence the plan to use a
will you look for a SATA3 drive as your motherboard small capacity SSD to keep your operating
supports this? small SSD for the operating system and
system and programs on, and use a large
programs, and a mechanical hard disc
Use an SSD for the OS capacity hard disc for your data storage.
drive for data storage.
The SSD will make start-up of the
For your main storage you will probably operating system much quicker and your Here are examples of the cheapest
use a mechanical hard drive which writes programs will load much more quickly. storage devices per GB in our list.
data to a series of “platters” and has a
So, why not go all out for solid state Drives you might consider
moving read/write head. There is nothing
storage? One reason is that even in this Type of Model Capacity Price Price_Per_GB
wrong with these devices, but for speed drive
fantasy world of building a crazy but cool
you might be thinking of an SSD drive. HDD Seagate 512 256 0.5
machine there are limits to finance and SSD WD 128 256 2
These are solid state drives which have no
two 512gb SSD drives will probably cost
moving parts, so are more robust in
more than the rest of the project
moving environments such as laptops or
together. Another reason is that currently

1
Tuesday , 6 August Galal Omar

You will find some other combinations of RAID1 configuration mirrors the data on
hard disc and solid state technology. Some two discs. This gives the security of
hybrid hard disc drives include a solid automatic backup as all data is recorded
state cache to improve read/write speeds. on both discs and if one disc fails, the
Another consideration is to combine a other can take over.
hard disc drive with an SSD to use as high
For speed and security, RAID10 combines
speed cache.
both striped and mirrored data using four
Still the need for speed? discs. This now sounds a bit excessive for
our gaming machine, but you might
Here is another consideration. You might consider a pair of SSDs in RAID0 for your
want to set up your disc drives in a RAID operating system.
configuration. You might combine discs
for speed or security or both. In RAID0, Here are some fast solid state drives that
the data is written across two discs as you might consider for the system:
though they were one. This is called
Happy building! Next week we will
“striping”. This gives extra speed to
examine options for a graphic card.
reading and writing to disc, but has the
Top
disadvantage that the loss of one disc
means the loss of data on both discs. You
will need to make sure you have regular
backups of your data.