Let's go driving!

The drive cage

Disk drives - simple, right?  Well, not quite.  The disk drive is the most expensive single component that we'll need so we took a lot of care trying to make the right choice.  In fact, we plan to have 2 drives.  One will be a super-fast solid state drive (or SSD in the geek-speak).  They are fast, but also expensive, so we plan to have one not too large and use it to store only the programs that we run most often.  We'll have a larger, ordinary drive (one that actually has a disk in it!) to store all those music files, videos and so on.

So how does all this work?  Well. the Antec case we are using has a really neat way of keeping all your drives safely in place.  The case has what's called a drive "cage", which slides out of the case on rails after undoing a couple of screws.  Then the cage has a bunch of smaller "trays", which also slide on rails and clip into the cage one above the other.  The cage will hold 5 (yes, five) drives if we want, but that seems like way too many (apart from being way too expensive), so we'll just stick with two.

The Crucial M4 SSD, all boxed up

One of the drive trays

We started with the solid state drive, and went for the Crucial M4.  Crucial seems like a well-liked brand, and the box is nice and calm after the boxes that the memory and mobo came in.  We stretched our budget to the model with 128 Gigabytes - they do come larger but that really would break the bank.