Computer Drives for Your Gaming Computer

You won’t get very far if you don’t have computer drives installed in your gaming computer. I remember my first couple of builds. I must have had six drives installed. I had a hard drive, floppy drive, CD, DVD, and a zip drive. Storage technology has come a long way and it is no longer necessary to clutter a case like that. USB drives have made zip drives and other storage devices obsolete. You can get away with far less in your case without giving up any conveniences.

Hard Drive

There are still certain computer drives that are necessary. The hard drive being the most important. The hard drive holds your operating system and stores all of your data. It is important to get a quality hard drive with plenty of storage capacity. You’ll find a link below to more detailed articles on hard drives.

In way of a brief overview I’d recommend getting a 500GB hard drive that spins at 7200 RPM with 32 MB of cache. If you really have a lot to store you can upgrade to larger drive. Hard drives with a terabyte of space are well within reach these days. Either that or you can hook up two hard drives in a RAID array for more capacity. Computer drives in a RAID 0 are actually faster than a single hard drive.

If you do not require a great deal of storage space you can go with a smaller hard drive. 150GB, 250GB, and 320GB drives are still quite popular computer drives.

DVD/CD Drives

You no longer need multiple drives in this category. You can get a very nice DVD burner that will cover all of your CD/DVD needs. The best part is that they only cost about $30. If you are building a new computer you can recycle your old one but at $30 it won’t hurt to get a new one if yours is several years old.

Floppy Drives

Floppy drives are completely unnecessary. I used to keep one around for startup disks but you don’t even need them for that anymore. USB drives work great and if you have an internet connection you can download just about anything you need. About the only reason to have a floppy drive is if you are really nostalgic and you just can’t let go.

Blu-Ray

BluRay drives have really come down in price. They hold an incredible amount of data but I’m usually not putting 25GB on disk. If you do, go for it but unless I’m building an HTPC I leave the Blu-Ray to my home theater system.

That’s a quick run down. You can find great deals on computer drives at Tiger Direct and Newegg. For more detailed information see the links below.