Hard Drives
Your computer's hard drive provides the primary data storage for your system. The operating system, installed applications, and your data all reside here.

As time has gone by, the need for hard drive space has increased--applications and operating systems require an ever increasing amount of disk space to function. Fortunately, the industry has met this demand by constantly increasing hard drive capacities.

When you're choosing a hard drive for your new system, you should opt for the largest capacity you can afford. But, keep in mind that you need to ensure you're purchasing the correct drive type.

The most common drives today use the Serial ATA (SATA) interface. This would be my personal choice for any home computer. Be sure your motherboard supports SATA. Ideally, you'll have a motherboard that supports SATA-300. A SATA-300 device (also know as SATA-II) gives you twice the throughput of a SATA-150 device. If you purchase a SATA-300 drive fo use with your SATA-300 compatible motherboard, you should carefully examine the documentation that comes with your drive. It's quite likely that you'll need to change a jumper on the drive to allow it to perform at its maximum speed.

Other drive types are available, as well. These include the old IDE/EIDE (ATA/PATA) interface drives. Most modern motherboards still have at least one PATA interface, but this connector is most commonly used to connect CD or DVD drives.

If you're looking to expand your computer's data storage capacity or add a drive for backups, an external USB 2.0 or Firewire attached drive is often a great choice.

CD/DVD Drives
If you're building a new computer, then you'll absolutely need an optical drive of some sort. I highly recommend you equip your computer with a drive that can record as well as play back media. A DVD writer is an excellent choice for this. Not only can a typical DVD writer read and write most DVD formats, it can read and write most CD formats as well.

Most DVD/CD drives still use a PATA interface, but there is an increasing number that now use SATA. I'm currently using a SATA DVD writer, and I'm quite happy with its performance.

And, just like hard drives, you can add an external USB 2.0 CD or DVD drive to your computer with very little effort.

USB Thumb Drives (Pen Drives)
Portable USB data storage devices use flash memory to store information. Flash memory is RAM that doesn't require constant power to maintain its contents. USB flash drives are a great way to transport and backup your files. Drives up to 8GB are available today for as low as $35.00.

Floppy Drives
Floppy drives are fast becoming a component of the past. However, they do sometimes come in handy. On occasion you may need a floppy drive to boot your system, to install firmware updates, or to access old (really old!) miscellaneous data.

Fortunately, floppy drives are dirt cheap. If you have a spare 3.5" bay in your case, I recommend installing one... just in case.

Media Card Reader
Another worthwhile investment is a media card reader. This will allow you to read the various types of media cards used by digital cameras, video recorders, smartphones, etc. without having to connect the device to your computer with a clunky USB cable. An internal media card reader will usually fit quite nicely into a 3.5" bay. The internal card reader connects to your motherboard via an internal USB connector. Optionally, you can pick up an external model that connects via an external USB port.

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