How do I know which hard drive to use when building a computer?

Question

I have not bought anything but my processor so any suggestions on what kind of things to buy would be helpful.

IDE, SATA, SCSI, ATA i don't know which one to use with which kind of motherboard. I want to use Serial ATA but I don't know which mother board will work.

Answer 1

Knowing what the computer is for would be helpful. There are basically 2 factors to consider, capacity and performance. Do you know how much space you need? It's probably hard to find much smaller than 80 Gb these days, but you can get a 500 Gb drive if you need one. Performance has a couple variations. Disks that turn faster can return data faster that disks that turn slower. Standard speeds include 5600, 7200, and 10,000 rpm. Another wrinkle in performance is the memory buffer. 2 MB is standard, but some disks offer 8MB or 16 MB buffers, which improve performance.

If your building a database machine, we can talk about RAID, but that is whole nother discussion.

Answer 2

SATA stands for Serial Advandce Attachment Technology.
SATA 2 is currently the latest Hard Disk in the market.
It is faster than IDE Hard Disk. (Western Digital is a good brand)

Get at least 512MB of RAM (preferably DDR2) (Kingston is a good brand).

If you are doing graphics, a Graphic Card is a must.

A burner (preferably DVD RW) is quite cheap these days

Intel chipset is a good motherboard (G956 the latest)
Insists on Intel's Processor (preferably Core 2 Duo)

That's it.
You have a great machine.
*If you think that is not enough, get a Mac (I'm using one. No regrats)