Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. How to Build a PC - Part 4
Hard Drives, DVD drives and more
The ECS KA3 MVP motherboard is very flexible in the drive connection department. The main decision boils down to whether to use the aging PATA or the newer SATA connections for our hard drive. Unless you have an existing PATA drive you want to re-use, it's a no brainer, choose SATA. Even with that decision out the way, there are still options. One could use the fairly standard SATA connections available on the board but instead I've opted to use two additional SATA connections which include a couple of extra features, various RAID options plus NCQ.
RAID is essentially a way to use two or more hard drives to improve performance or functionality. RAID comes in different flavours. The types we could use here are RAID 0, also known as a striped set which combines the space of two drives in to one logical drive. As an example, you could have two 250Gb drives which the system sees as a single 500Gb drive. This improves speed as the reads/writes get spread over both drives, sharing the load and improving the throughput quite markedly. The downside is that if a single drive fails, you lose everything on both drives. The other option is RAID 1 which mirrors the data from one drive to another. Here, a pair of 250Gb drives would look like a single 250Gb drive. The advantage is that if the main drive dies, the other will contain (hopefully!) a perfect copy which can be quickly activated getting you up and running almost immediately. For a more detailed discussion, check out Wikipedia.
For this build however, I'm sticking to a single drive, a Samsung Spinrite 250Gb SATA drive which sells for around £55. Samsung don't really have the market presence they deserve as their drives have some nice technology, run quietly, coolly and seem to be more reliable than most. I will be using the NCQ (Native Command Queuing) feature which this drive supports. Normally, a hard drive will process requests for data in whatever order it received them. NCQ allows a compatible drive to dynamically change the order of requests to maximise the performance by getting data nearest the drive heads first. Whilst this technology is more of use in a server type environment with multiple simultaneous requests, on a desktop PC it can still make a small to medium improvement in performance so I'll go for that. It also reduces the power needs as the drive will need to move the heads about somewhat less. Again, you can read more on Wikipedia.
Fitting
The Antec Nine Hundred case has removable drive cages to ease working with them. To fit the hard drive, the cage is removed and the drive screwed in to place using the four supplied screws. I did find this particular drive cage a bit fiddly to work with compared to some as the holes for the screws aren't big enough to get your fingers in to to insert the screws in the drive. A magnetic screwdriver would be ideal but I used small blobs of Blu Tack to make the screws stay on the screwdriver long enough to seat them.
Once the hard drive is fitted, the cage is put back in place in the case and the power and data cables connected. In the bad old days of PATA drives, this mean running a wide ribbon cable around which could easily make for a messy PC. SATA drives use a thin cable for the data and a smaller, neater connector for the power making it much easier to fit. As we're in a period of transition, most SATA drives have connectors for the old power connectors as used elsewhere in a PC as well as the newer dedicated SATA power ones. Don't fit both!!!
Once the hard drive is sorted out, it's time to fit the optical drive, a DVD writer from LG.
LG GSA-H22N DVD writer
Not so long ago, a DVD writer was considered a luxury. Heck, a fast CD-ROM was considered a luxury! My first DVD writer was a 2X job that stored 4.3Gb and cost a mere £400. This time around, I'm using an LG GSA-H22N. This rather unprepossessing name hides a rather tasty specification. The LG GSA-H22N can write DVDs at 18X speed which is pretty impressive given the number of manufacturers who made noises about 16X being the best they could manage without the disks shattering. It also handles rewritable DVDs at 8X, dual layer (8.5Gb) disks at 8X and far more importantly for me, DVD-RAM at an astonishing 12X although blank media that supports that speed is a bit thin on the ground at this time. Despite being very early to market, DVD-RAM never really got the market position it deserved. Unlike DVD+R and DVD-R, it includes defect management and error control making it a better contender for data backup and archiving. The particular GSA-H22N here has a black fascia to match the black Antec case. On the CD side it supports CD-R at 48X, CD-RW at 32X and CD-ROM at 48X. All in all, a very nippy drive, especially for the price of around £27 in black/OEM guise. It's also available in a proper shiny box with Nero and Cyberlink software to help you get the most from the drive.
Having had a number of DVD and CD writers over the years, I have come to like LG drives. They tend to work more smoothly and quietly than other brands and the price is usually pretty competitive. Almost every other drive I've used has started to develop teething troubles after a while but the three LG drives I've had to review (two CD writers and a DVD writer) just go on and on. Another nice feature is this drive supports the setting of the booktype to DVD-ROM. This allows you to burn DVDs that should work on other DVD devices that tend to be fussy with burned DVDs. The GSA-H22N is also capable of backing up many types of protected disks making it useful if you have kids and want to preserve your master copies of games and whatnot.
As this drive is PATA based, it needs to be set using the jumpers at the back as the master. Normally, you'd have a hard drive as master and the optical drive as slave but with the hard drive being SATA, the optical drive gets to be master on the IDE connection. The top part of the Nine Hundred case doesn't have a removable drive cage so the GSA-H22N is fitted straight in. Before you can do this though, you need to remove the corresponding blanking plate from the front of the case so the drive is accessible externally. In most cases, these blanking plates simply pop out with a little pressure. Once done, you can slide in the drive, screw it in to place with two screws either side then connect it to the motherboard by a ribbon cable to the IDE connector (IDE0) and to a normal power connector.
That's the hard drive and DVD writer dealt with. In part 5 I will cover the graphics card and other bits and pieces but that's all for now.
