Hard Drives: Seagate Barracuda 250GB/500GB, Samsung Spinpoint 1TB, or Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB The new Velociraptor drives from Western Digital are clearly the performace champions in the gaming PC arena for the foreseeable future. Pretty much every review out there agrees with that. The performance gain primarily comes from the speed at which the internal platters of data are spinning. Because the platters in the Velociraptor spin at 10,000rpm vs the more common 7,200rpm, the PC is able to read and write data to and from the drive more quickly. The question is, then, is it worth the price? At roughly $1 per Gigabyte, the Velorciraptor is pretty pricy compared to about 17 cents/gig for the 500GB Barracuda or the Samsung 1TB. The latter two drives have 32MB caches on them (the size of the cache determines how efficiently the drive can perform) whereas the Velociraptor uses 16MB. Although the Velociraptor is still the clear winner in performance tests, the 32MB cache drives aren't all that much slower. There's a great performance comparison on Tom's Hardware here. The bottom line is that both the Seagate and the Samsung drives deliver about 85% of the performance for about 17% of the cost. On top of that, bear in mind that the primary "bottlenecks" which are slowing your games down are the processor and video cards in your PC, not the hard drives. There are aspects of gaming which respond better to faster hard drives, such as level loading and quick saves, but the faster hard drives won't really increase the framerate (smoothness) of your games very much. Having said that, we would recommend the Velociraptor only if you've already upgraded to a faster video card and 4GB of memory, and are still looking for ways to speed things up, in which case the Velociraptor is an excellent option. Otherwise, the 500GB Seagate and the 1TB Samsung both offer a fantastic speed and capacity value. The Ion's default drive, the Seagate Barracuda 250GB, is a 16MB cache drive, and offers slightly less performance than the 500GB version.

CONFIGURE AN ION

More About The Reactor Starting at $2,550