The latest in Axel Cushing's ongoing series about how to build a big, bad gaming PC. If you haven't read them already, be sure to check out Part I and Part II as well.

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Building The Perfect Rig - The Hard, The Soft, and The Floppy

When you're working on building a new box, memory and data storage are no less of a concern than having a killer video card or the best CPU. Without sufficient system RAM, you can't even load up your operating system, to say nothing of running the latest games. Without enough hard drive space, you won't be able to hold save games, mods, or even the basic programs for your game library. And without an optical drive of some sort, you can forget about going down to pick up new games because you won't have the means to install them in the first place, to say nothing of backing up data or killing time watching movies on your PC. In this article, I'll go over the various methods of memory and data storage that you'll need to get your rig off the ground.

The Hard: Hard Drives

As ubiquitous as they have become, hard drives are actually a fairly recent invention in terms of personal computing. Apple's Macintosh computers were probably the first personal computers with a commercially available mass storage medium. The Macintosh XL, first released in 1985, was the first model Apple produced to carry a hard drive with a capacity of 10MB. Laugh, if you like, but keep in mind that at that particular time, floppy disks could only carry a few hundred kilobytes of data. Given that, 10MB would be considerable.

Over the next twenty years, hard drives increased in speed and storage capacity. It seems only a short time since the first 1GB hard drive was even announced, much less put into production. And yet we are fast closing in on the 1TB (terabyte) mark for hard drive capacity. For those of you who are sharp eared, and more of a geek than you're willing to admit, you might consider how dated the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation is when they describe their computer core has having only several hundred terabytes of capacity. All things being equal, and assuming that the current curve for data storage progression remains fairly constant, it is likely we'll be hearing about 1PB (petabyte) hard drives within the next decade.

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From a physics standpoint, hard drives aren't much different than the floppy disks that preceded them. A platter of ferrous material is spun at high speeds while an armature within the drive casing bombards the surface with magnetic pulses, creating a small area which a computer can, through that same armature, interpret as containing strings of ones and zeroes. The

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big difference, aside from the obvious difference of capacity, lies in the structure of the hard drive. The platter of a hard drive is significantly thicker than that of a floppy disk. The amount and density of ferrous material is what gives hard drives their increased capacity. And yet the diameter of a hard drive platter is no bigger than that of a floppy disk's recording surface. One has to wonder if there is an upper limit to the amount of capacity that a hard drive can hold using ferrous material. After all, if CPUs hit a wall at a certain level of miniaturization where they can't squeeze any more transistors on to silicon, wouldn't hard drives also do so with the magnets in the read/write armature and the ferrous material in the platters? There is a limit, known as the superparamagnetic limit, which keeps data capacity on a hard drive to about 100Gbit (gigabits) per square inch. Naturally, researchers are probably working hard to overcome this limit, but for right now, there's not quite the same sense of urgency in hard drive storage as there is for CPU speeds.

Hard drive capacity is not the only thing to have advanced over the last two decades. Speed, in various respects, has also become an important consideration. The speed at which the platters spin has been increasing, and right now the faster drives spin at 7200RPM, though "slower" 5400RPM drives are still around. The speed of data transfer, the reading and writing of pulses to the computer and back, has also increased. Where data throughput from a hard drive to the CPU was measured in kilobits (Kb) or megabits (Mb), current throughput is now into the gigabit (Gb) range. Previously, when one had to construct a computer, the general standard was the ATA specification, also known as the IDE specification. It was easy to set up, but very limited in how many devices it could control. Alternatively, you could use the SCSI specification, which had greater data bandwidth and allowed one to connect multiple devices together, even allowing the creation of what is known as a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system or RAID array. However, SCSI controllers were not put into most home computers, since RAIDs were primarily used in network and mission critical application settings rather than the mundane day-to-day work the average home computer was cranking out at the time. Today, the best of both worlds seems to have come about in the Serial ATA (SATA) specification. The ease of use of the ATA specification combined with the multiple drive chaining and RAID possibilities of the SCSI specification has created new options for gamers. The current SATA specification allows for a truly impressive 3Gb/sec data transfer rate, far better than the original ATA spec. Moreover, the cabling for a SATA drive is considerably smaller. Where one had to wrangle with broad forty-pin ribbon cables before, the average SATA cable is only a quarter of an inch across, which creates enormous space savings when you figure all the other things that will be shoehorned into your case. This does not, however, mean the death knell for ATA/IDE or SCSI. Those specifications will likely be around for a long time to come.

Cushing's Choice: Being a gamer, and something of a lousy archivist, I've had to manage space on my hard drives for a while now. I'd like to be able to have a good chunk of space available to load up more than a few games and have plenty of room left over for writings, video files, non-game applications, etc. I'd also like to make sure that, should something go catastrophically wrong, I've got a means to save myself. So, the new rig will have three hard drives, all using the SATA2 specification. The primary drive will be a 160GB Seagate Diamond series drive while the secondary drives will be 500GB Seagate Diamonds. You may be asking yourself "Why go with such a small drive as your primary drive?" There is a certain logic to it, mainly having to do with maintenance and the way that the primary drive is used. From a maintenance standpoint, when you have to run Scandisk or Disk Defragmentation, it is logically going to take less time to clean up and maintain a 160GB drive as opposed to a 500GB drive. At the time I purchased the drives, I was unable to find a good SATA hard drive smaller than 160GB. There were plenty of 80GB and 120GB IDE drives, and even a couple of SCSI drives, but I was looking to keep the hard drives all on the same standard to facilitate RAID setup during the actual build. As far as usage, ideally, I won't be using the primary drive for anything other than operating system functions. Data storage will be handled by the other two drives. The way that Windows functions, it uses half the available space on the hard drive its installed on as virtual memory. So, the less I load on the primary drive, the more virtual memory will be available to Windows. More virtual memory, the fewer problems I'm likely to encounter. When it comes to actually creating a RAID setup, part of the space on the secondary drives will undoubtedly be taken up creating a drive mirror, a backup of the primary drive. But with a total of over a terabyte of space to play with, even with drive mirroring, I should have more than enough room to load up plenty of games.

The Soft: RAM

Bill Gates is attributed with making the infamous statement, "640KB ought to be enough for anybody." Whether he did or not (he denies having said it), the speaker was, of course, wildly incorrect.

When personal computers first came out, they naturally didn't have a whole lot of memory. But then again, the programs that were being run didn't really use a whole lot of memory. Commodore's C64 computer was the day-to-day workhorse for its time, while the C128 was its bigger brother, capable of running bigger and more powerful programs. The Apple IIe which proliferated throughout school systems in the early 80s only had 64KB, though the enhanced version which came out in 1985 did have the larger 128KB memory system. IBM PC Jrs came out with 64KB originally, but later came out with 128KB, while the more business oriented PC XTs came with RAM ranging from 64KB all the way to a whopping 256KB. It sounds silly now, but for the time period, that amount of RAM was big. Also keep in mind, this was before hard drives became a standard feature. As time passed, the built-in RAM on PCs slowly increased. However, DOS could only address the first 640KB of RAM. While Windows 3.0 and 3.11 could address the upper memory registers without much in the way of complaint, most games were written to be run in DOS. Thus, if you booted into Windows, you couldn't drop out to DOS and run a game such as X-Wing or Ultima VII. You would have to create a specific boot disk that booted the system straight into DOS and was specifically configured to address the upper memory areas. For all you younger gamers out there, find an older gamer and ask him what it was like to tinker with the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. You'll likely get a laugh out of them.

Originally, when the first PCs were coming out, memory was hardwired into the motherboard. Upgrades required the services of a full computer shop, a soldering iron, and probably nothing short of a miracle finding a chip that would be compatible with the existing chip socket. In short, if you wanted more memory, you bought a new computer. Around the mid-80's, IBM's PS/2 computers became equipped with a wonderful new feature: a Single Inline Memory Module (SIMM) socket. Suddenly, the upgrading and replacement of memory no longer required horrendous expenditures of time, effort, and cash. The average user could now pop the new memory into a socket with a little bit of effort and considerably less cash, though he did need to buy and install the SIMMs in pairs. The amount of physical effort was further reduced with the introduction of Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) sockets for SIMMs. With the advent of Windows 95 and Intel's 386 processors, the average gamer began to see a change in his options for games. New games weren't being written for DOS anymore but specifically for Windows. Slowly, the use of boot disks and the necessity of altered boot files fell out of practice.

Time continued to march on, and with it, new advances in RAM. SIMMs, for all their usefulness, had a glaring inefficiency: the system had to be able to access both of them at the same time. Enter the Dual Inline Memory Module (DIMM). A single DIMM could be inserted into a memory module socket and the computer would be able to access the full amount of the memory available. However, to get the most bang for the buck, DIMMs are even today still mounted into computers in pairs. While the basic structure of a DIMM hasn't changed too radically, the fine points of its connectors, data paths, read/write rates, and other arcana have led to the current environment of tremendous amounts of RAM being available for gamers.

Cushing's Choice: For all the wealth of options for RAM available to gamers, you can't just stick any old DIMM into your motherboard and expect it work. Check your motherboard manual for the manufacturers that are supported and recommended for use in your motherboard. Also, make sure that you have the correct number of pins. DDR2 RAM (the most prevalent type of RAM on the market at the moment) has 240 connector pins, as opposed to 184 for DDR. For myself, I've gone and bought myself four sticks of Corsair XMS DDR2-800 1GB modules, giving me 4GB of RAM. While the motherboard has the capacity to support up to 8GB of RAM, four sticks of 2GB DDR2-800 RAM would be at least twice what I've paid for the pair of two 1GB stick blister packs. At a later date, I might need to upgrade. Perfectly fine and well. But 4GB should give me plenty to work with for right now.

The Floppy: Removable Media

In these so-called enlightened times, the floppy disk drive has become something of an anachronism. However, it's a terribly useful anachronism. Yes, it stores less than 1.5MB of data (1.44MB total space, usually about 1.2MB to 1.3MB, depending on the formatting used). Yes, they're easily lost. Yes, they're clunky. But if you can find one, it's probably a good thing to have around. Why? That megabyte of effective disk space might not be much use for big projects or anything like that, but it is terribly useful for small things like script files and, more importantly, BIOS updates. You might be able to fit several BIOS updates on a single 3 1/4" floppy disk. Yes, you can fit tens of thousands of BIOS updates on a flash drive or tens of millions on a burnable CD or DVD. But that sort of thing is overkill. Floppy disks are the original removable media for computers, and it's something of a nod to those early days of computing if you can manage to scare one up in the current market to put in your new rig.

Of course, if you can't manage that, or figure you're not going to shackle yourself to the ancient anachronisms of computing's Neanderthal days, there are plenty of other options available for removable media. As was mentioned before, CDs and DVDs are both available, and have become fairly cheap compared to a few years ago. It was not always thus. CDs had been available as early as the mid-80s, but their use at that time had been strictly for music recordings, the smaller cousin to the massive laserdisc players of the time.(As a neat little aside, the original Dragon's Lair arcade stand-up units were nothing more than laserdisc players inside arcade game cabinets. The game, simple though it was, pre-saged the use of optical media for game purposes by several years) During the first big round of console wars between Nintendo and Sega, a third party was looking to get your hard earned gaming dollar: NEC. Their console, the TurboGrafix 16, had a hefty ad campaign behind it which highlighted two unique technologies for gamers. The first was its touted 16-bit graphics, produced by a dedicated 16-bit graphics chip, though the console only had an 8-bit CPU. The second was the TurboGrafix CD drive, which promised to bring amazing new features to games. Sega, however, wouldn't be outdone, and in 1989, they brought out the Genesis console, though the Sega CD peripheral wouldn't be available for American gamers till 1992. In any event, games were never quite the same afterwards.

The CD-ROM spec didn't catch on in PC gaming quite as fast as it did for consoles. The biggest obstacle wasn't technical in nature, but rather perceptual. The general public, even gamers, just didn't see a burning need to get CD-ROM drives. They were an extravagance. The marketing buzz of "multimedia" just didn't seem to really stick. And then, a small little game development house named Cyan came out with what is unquestionably the first killer app for CD-ROMs: Myst. Today, we look at Myst and see a somewhat dated slide show with neat little bits of QuickTime animation and some small windowed full motion video sequences. But in 1993, it did what all the marketing buzz in the world couldn't do. It proved the viability of the format. It was a practical and enjoyable demonstration of how CD-ROMs could make games better than they were at the time. Until the release of The Sims in 2000, Myst held the title of best selling game of all time, and it spurred more than a few consumers to buy a CD-ROM drive to check it out. Naturally, the rise of CD-ROMs led to the demise of the floppy disk as the medium of choice for distributing games, just as the DVD-ROM is now slowly beginning to replace CDs as the medium of choice for distributing games.

You would think that, having had the experience of Myst and the lesson it taught about new media for games, PC gamers would be chucking their CD drives out the window when the DVD format came around. No such luck. Unlike Myst and CD-ROMs, DVDs didn't have the same sort of killer app. The closest thing to such a "must-have" entertainment title was the DVD release of the movie The Matrix. Meanwhile, console gamers were given their first taste of DVD-ROM with the PlayStation2 in October 2000, the only console on the market at that time which was using DVDs as a medium for games. To this day, CD-ROM is still the dominant format for computer games, though some developers are moving over to the larger capacity DVD-ROMs as their new titles grow ever more ambitious.

Cushing's Choice: These days, it's just this side of impossible to get "only" a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive for your computer. With the advent of the CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, and the rest of the alphabet soup that comprises recordable optical media, it is possible for the PC gamer to have the ability to read optical media and save massive amounts of data to an optical media format in a relatively short amount of time, all from the same drive. Keep in mind that compared to floppy disks or flash media, burning discs is slow going. Also keep in mind that out of the three, rewritable optical media is far more limited in its ability to erase and accept new data than magnetic or flash media. Nevertheless, when you've got a gargantuan amount of data that you need to clear off your hard drives, optical media's the best way to make it portable and relatively safe from environmental hazards that would ruin other forms of data storage. For myself, I've decided to go with a pair of Pioneer DVR-R200 DVD/CD Writer drives. The Pioneer drive that I popped into my current rig has been working like a champ, and I saw no reason not to go with a company that has proven to make good hardware. These new drives cover every conceivable readable and recordable optical media standard currently out there, they're Vista compatible, and (should I start feeling really artistic) they have built-in LightScribe functionality for disc labeling.

Final Thoughts: The Piecemeal Process

The process of picking and choosing components demands patience and financial discipline. You have bills of your own. You have to eat. You have to put gas in your car. You may have pets. You may have a spouse and kids. You may only have a girlfriend or boyfriend who may or may not be sponging off you. You may run into unexpected situations whereby the funds you had lined up for that killer video card suddenly have to go to repair the transmission on your car. Some suggestions from somebody who's been going through the process and sharing it with you, Gentle Readers.

Cookie Jars Aren't Just For Chocolate Chips: Find a jar. Find a box. Buy a can of coffee, brew it up, drink it all down, and clean out the can when you're done. Make it your computer fund. Put at least a little bit of your paycheck in there. Twenty bucks. Fifty bucks. Even a C-note if you can swing it. But put some cash in there. No, it's not going to gain interest like it would in a bank, but it's there in case you need it. Make an accounting of the contents every month. Resist the terrible urge to dip into the can when you're in the mood for pizza.

Wait For It: You've just found the weekly circular for the local computer store, trumpeting the latest hardware which immediately causes you to think, "That would look good in my new computer that I'm building." You unthinkingly go to your coffee can computer fund and start counting, thinking, "I've got this much, I can make up the difference with my regular checking account/debit card/credit card." Stop yourself. Slap yourself. Berate yourself for trying to use the computer can money before you should have. Repeat until the weekly circular no longer holds any temptation for you. Yes, there's new hardware. Yes, it might be cool to get. It will also be replaced at some point by newer hardware. Getting on the new hardware treadmill is an invitation to disaster. You'll spend so much time going after new hardware you may never actually get the damned computer built! Restrain yourself, watch for prices to go down, read about how the new hardware will work with the stuff you've already bought, and don't be afraid to pass on it for the present if the word on the street is initially unfavorable. It takes time to work out the bugs, and nothing sucks more than being a paid beta tester for computer hardware.

Accept The Unexpected: The Demon Murphy (of Murphy's Law infamy) can and will do horrible and unspeakable things to you at the absolute worst possible moment. It will make you angry. It will leave you feeling frustrated. Worse, it'll set back the timetable you had in mind for getting your computer built. Accept the miracle, pernicious though it may be, and move on. You won't like it, but you have to do it. If it's any consolation, sometimes, Murphy looks suspiciously like Santa Claus and you'll catch a break. As before, don't argue about it. Accept it and move on.

Until next time...

Axel Cushing

September 14, 2007