On a clear disk, you can seek forever

My initial choice for a hard drive was a 1 Terabyte Western Digital. That is a mind boggling amount of storage and since the high def programs were going to be so large, I figured that I'd need every byte of it. However, as I was getting ready to make my actual order, I saw a customer review at Newegg where someone had bought 5 of them and had already returned 3. Not good odds, so I decided to go with something not quite so bleeding edge.

Instead I picked a Western Digital Caviar Green 640 GB disk drive. Assuming that the OS takes 200 GB and broadcast HD is about 6 GB per hour, that gives me about 73 hours of record time.

(Judy tells me that Sage TV recommends that I create a separate partition for the HD files with a large block size, like 64K, which is good to know before you install the operating system.)

One other point about hard drives to touch on: most hard drives these days communicate with the motherboard via a serial cable. They use what is known as the SATA (Serial AT Attachment) standard. Back in the day of the AT (Advance Technology) computer, the motherboard communicated with the hard drive via a ribbon cable with a lot of wires in parallel. This standard was called IDE, but it has now been renamed PATA (Parallel AT Attachment). However, now all hard drives use a serial connection with just a pair of wires. This simplifies the hardware, is faster, allows for full duplex (reading and writing simultaneously) and hot swapping of drives while in operation. See the Wikipedia Serial ATA article for more information.

Having said that, CD drives and DVD drives still tend to be PATA, although the Blu-Ray drive that I was going to buy was SATA.

And, speaking of that Blu-Ray drive, let's cover that next.