Hard Drive: Maxtor DiamondMax 15.3GB ATA/66 7200RPM 2MB 
$84.95

With a gig of power we're going to want plenty of space for games and other programs, we're going to want to throw everything we can at 1000+ MHz. Of course we also want something that's fast, and not too expensive... thank god hard drives have come so far in the past few years. If someone told me last year that in a year I'd be able to get a 15GB, ATA/66, 7,200rpm drive for under $100 I would have laughed. Well now I can get one for under $85 and I'm not laughing at all. ;

Unless you're going to be dumping your entire CD collection onto this computer a 15GB drive should be more than enough room for the OS, games, and software you plan on running... that with plenty of room for fun stuff too. We've got an ATA/66 controller on the motherboard, that should work well with this ATA/66 drive, and 7,200rpm with 2MB of cache yields a pretty sweet 9.0ms average seek time for a drive of this price. 

This is one place where it's easy to spend a little more to get something a little bigger (we all know that size matters). But for most value conscious users 15GB is going to be plenty, especially when it's this fast. 

Price: CD-ROM: Acer 50x EIDE 650A 128K 85MS 6000KB/SEC
$32.00

Any computer these days needs a CD-ROM drive, but since most people rarely use them, it's not something that we need to be really good. Unless you're doing a whole lot of file transfers or installing a lot of stuff off a CD constantly, anything more than 50x will probably go to waste and your drive will be mostly unused. ;

40-50x seems to be the sweet spot for value, and Acer delivers a nice 50x drive, no fills, no gimmicks, just a great price with acceptable seek times and transfer speeds. Really we don't need much from our CD-ROM drive, and $32.00 is a great price for what is pretty much a necessity. 

Floppy Drive: NEC 1.44MB 3.5inch
$9.00

Can't seem to get rid of this cumbersome drive can we? As useless as 1.44MB is, we still need the drive for BIOS updates and boot disks. Oh well, at least it's cheap. Really nothing much more to be said about this, only listed because it's so much of a necessity, actually kinda shocked that I couldn't find one for much cheaper, oh well. 

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