Seagate hard drives uses more processing power and they are picky about the quality of the power supply. I recommend Western Digital or Hitachi. I recommend stay away from Maxtor, Seagate, and Samsung. Quantum hard drives are horrible. What makes a computer fast, is the speed (latency) of the hard drive. Both Western Digital and Hitachi produces hard drives that are great for all types of work. Majority of my hard drives are from both Western Digital and Hitachi. I have two Seagate and one Maxtor hard drive. Their performance is not up to par of a six year old Hitachi hard drive.

Benchmarks are hard to read. Benchmarks are estimates, not really real world loads.

Are you saying that Seagate drives take a heavier power supply, or that they take away more processing cycles from the CPU?

I see that there are a number of Maxtor drives blacklisted in one of the driver modules.

What I mean picky. Seagate drives needs a well filtered and regulated power supply or else they will not function. Also they use more processor resources even though they are set at DMA. It is not just Seagate, Maxtor drives also have the same problems.

Seagate drives are also blacklisted. It is not in one module, it is in many modules.

I am sticking with Western Digital and Hitachi because they are the best brands.

How do they manage to this? The command data stream sent to a drive doesn't change based on whether it's Seagage, Hitachi, or Western Digital, does it?

I have an Asus M2N 32SLI Deluxe board and Asus lists the brand as well as the model of memory this board is compatible with. Anyone buying memory should check the motherboard specs as many buyers of this board, like some others, have discovered that the ram they bought won't work which makes their pc unable to boot. When it comes to what memory is the best, it really depends on which motherboard you have, who makes it and how much ram you want to install. When you find that out, you will know that you are limited to some brands and some models with particular specifications.

Before you buy any memory, go to the website that manufactures your motherboard and read the specs and memory recommended as it will list names and models. Some memory is not compatible with my Asus M2N32 Sli deluxe board, many people bought this board and bought DDR2 memory that wouldn't work with this board. You know many retailers won't accept memory that has been installed, so check first.
With regards to hard drives, I can recommend the Maxtor Diamond Max 10 Sata 2 drives as they come with 16 mb cache and work reliably in either a Sata or Raid configuration.

I agree with electro. OZC is what I usually buy. Decent price & the low latency stuff overclocks well. Suprised it's not on the list.

I got Adata 512mb DDR2 800Mhz Sticks with Heatsink,They are higly overclockable and not as expensive as G.Skill and corsair.Very realiable