Additional Drives:
DVD:
Pioneer Slot Load SCSI 6x
Price: $206.64 (latest price
here)
You've got a fancy system, you need to be able to do
more than game on
it... and DVD turns your gaming rig into a pretty sweet movie station
as well. As far as DVD drives go there really isn't much difference
when you get to this level, beyond hardware decoding and software of
course. The Pioneer drive has all the features we want, plus the added
perk of being a slot load just like your car stereo. Sure it's not a
big deal but there's something inherently cool about just sliding a DVD
into a drive without first having to slide out the 'cupholder.' Now
Pioneer does have a 16x version of its DVD player announced, thought it
doesn't appear to be available as of yet, we'll have to just settle for
the 6x.
CD-ROM:
Plextor UltraPlex SCSI 40X
Price: $100.60 (latest price
here)
$100 for a CD-ROM drive? Damn SCSI is expensive, and
this is only a
40x. Of course you'll appreciate it when you're reading off the CD at
ridiculous speeds while doing all sorts of things with your computer
that would normally choke your IDE bandwidth down to a trickle. Sure
you can score yourself a 72x IDE drive, but honestly I'd much rather
have the stability of a 40x SCSI unit. Now if only they had a 72x
SCSI... mmm. Really though a CD-ROM drive is something you're not
going to use all that much, just have to include it because we can, and
of course you might want to be copying a CD while you're watching a DVD
at the same time.
CDR/RW:
Plextor 12/4/32x CD-RW
Price: $284.95 (latest price
here)
You better not use this to burn MP3s you stole off
Napster! Hehe...anyway, a gaming machine like this really needs what has become
such a
commonplace addition to any real power system over the past few years,
a CD-RW drive. Really when you think about how economical it is as far
as a storage medium goes, this shouldn't have been included at all
because there's really nothing excessive about it. CD-R and CD-RW
usage is pretty much the best value you're going to get out of any
writeable media solution out there and this drive just happens to be
the fastest at recording it. Sure it can only do 4x for CD-RW media,
but really unless you're going to write that CD at least 5 or 6 times
it's probably just best to stick to a bunch of CD-Rs that you can do at
12x anyway.
Since we already have a Plextor drive for the CD-ROM I
figured a
Plextor CD-RW would make a nice addition. And of course Plextor has
the fastest drive out there as far as raw speed goes... add on to that
their proven track record and their guarantee to pretty much never
coaster a CD and you have something that just shouldn't be passed up
for a machine like this, and for any machine really. The only kicker
here is that the IDE version of this drive can rewrite at 10x as
opposed to 4x. Personally I'm not sure what's going on there, someone
must have messed up somewhere down the line, but we won't hold it against
them.
Floppy Drive: Generic 1.44MB Floppy
Price: $11.07 (latest price
here)
It's a floppy drive, you'll likely never use it but you
still really do
need it. The floppy is undoubtedly the most useless element of this
machine, but one we absolutely can't go without. I'm actually just
kinda choked I can't find some exotic 1.44MB gold plated version just
to make this element a little more excessive.
Auxiliary Storage: Iomega Zip 250 SCSI
Price: $120.99 (latest price
here)
It's SCSI, it's a really big floppy disk basically,
something that will
prove useful in some aspect (especially for those of us who end up
using university labs populated with Zip drives.) Zip won out in the
mass floppy storage wars, though it really didn't amount to much given
the rampant popularity of writeable CD media... nonetheless a Zip drive
is a nice addition to this machine, nicer because it's SCSI, and even
better if you actually swap files on a regular basis with people who
have Zip drives.
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