Hard drives

If you’re looking to build a high-performance PC or a gaming system, it’s worth considering a solid-state drive (SSD). Offering substantial advantages to load and Windows boot times and general responsiveness, SSDs have also dropped in price since they hit the mainstream almost three years ago. At A$210, the Silicon Power Velox V30 is one of the cheaper 120GB models available, yet it's also one of the best.

The solid-state drive (SSD) market is still in its early stages, with comparatively low capacities and high prices confining them to being enthusiast-only products for the time being. What's more, SSDs will likely have shorter lifespans than standard drives and, given the capacity of affordable SSDs, you'll still need a conventional hard drive for storage, too. However, SSDs do offer a way forward, and they can be the icing on the cake for high-end systems, delivering faster Windows boot and game/app load times, and more snap and responsiveness to interfaces.

Of the three solid-state drives (SSDs) tested here, the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB offers the most well-rounded package. As with the others, this one uses a SandForce SD-1200 controller, along with MLC flash memory chips, though it’s the cheapest at a respectable $2.25 per GB. It’s worth noting that an SSD’s speed is actually a factor of both its flash memory and controller (SSD processor), which serves as the interface between the flash chips and the rest of your PC.

Thanks to its smaller capacity, the Patriot Inferno 60GB easily came in as the least expensive SSD we tested here, costing a comparatively tiny $160 on the street. That’s not quite the best bang for buck at $2.65 per GB, but it was a consistently competitive performer at least; if you don’t have a lot of money to spend, this one’s low price definitely helps its appeal. As with many other 2.5in SSDs, the Inferno includes a bracket that’ll let you install it in a normal 3.5in drive bay, something that many SSDs even up to six months ago were missing.

It’s not cheap, but if you want an all-in-one SSD RAID, then the OCZ RevoDrive 240GB offers a ton of performance and takes about a minute to install. The RevoDrive is in fact two SandForce-powered SSDs squeezed onto a single PCI Express (PCI-E) card, with a Silicon Image RAID controller bundled in. This essentially allows the device to be a completely self-contained striped RAID drive and installing it is just a matter of slotting it into a PCI-E port.

The arrival of 3TB internal hard drives marks a sort of Y2K moment for storage vendors — they’ve hit a wall because of older legacy technology that’s still in use in most of today’s PCs and notebooks. The problem has a couple of sources: the 32-bit nature of the Master Boot Record (MBR) method of storing partition information only allows it to handle drives below 2.19TB.