How to Build Your Own PC - Save A Buck And Learn A Lot  9  Chapter 2: Component Overview

Hard Disk Drive 1 Sound Card

You’ll certainly want a CD-RW drive. This will let you play music CDs, install software which comes on CDs, and back up your important information to CDs. The drive we purchased is illustrated in Figure 21.

Because hard drives do occasionally fail, it’s important to back up all your important information to some other media. Your information can be backed up to another hard drive, a tape drive, or, most commonly for consumers, a CD.

DVD drives are discussed in more detail in another chapter. If you plan to produce videos, you’ll want a DVD burner which will allow you to create your own DVD movies.

Most CD-RW and DVD drives are also called IDE devices. They are also called internal devices, which means they go inside the PC case. That’s the kind you’ll probably want for a PC. If you plan to share a device between multiple PCs, you could use an external drive and move it between the PCs. Otherwise, you could install a home network and allow all your PCs to access the device while it remained attached to a single PC.

A floppy drive (see Figure 22) isn’t called an IDE device, but it’s a standard component that’s readily available for about $15. Nobody uses them anymore.

Hard Disk Drive 1 Sound Card