How to choose the right cabinet for your desktop?

 The first and foremost important thing to consider before looking for a desktop case is that you know the form factor of your motherboard. If you know it, very well. However, if you don't know it, you should refer to the specifications of your motherboard or check it online. It is usually of the form ATX or micro ATX or BTX or micro BTX. This is important because the form factor decides the shape and size of the motherboard and we would obviously like to buy a cabinet, that can house our motherboard.

Secondly, it is a must that you buy a cabinet that has ample space inside. In simple words, buy a large cabinet. It promotes air flow and will keep your system cool. Thirdly, the case should not conduct electricity. Ensure that the case is not metallic and that each and every screw-hold for the components has rubber or plastic insides. This will help in preventing your system components from getting an electric shock.

Fourthly, there must be ample additional cooling fan attachment space in the cabinet. This is the first and the most critical point for gaming systems. Apart from the mandatory cooling fans present in your SMPS, over the CPU, and above the GPU, there should be provisions to attach more fans at the rear, the left side and in hardcore systems, the front as well.

Fifthly, see that the case has ample of hard drive and optical drive bays, so that you can attach as many HDD's and ODD's as you want. And optionally, look out for the optional components like headphone jacks, the number of USB connectors, etc. that help you in being more productive.

The image on the left shows a nice cabinet, with good cooling provisions.

Specifications of an Optical Drive

Various types of optical drives are available in the market. These include CD readers, CD writers, DVD readers, DVD writers, DVD combos, BD readers, BD writers and BD combos.

The specifications of an Optical Drive drives to be considered are:

Supported Media Types: The optical drive must support a major part of available types of discs in the market. Examples are CD-ROM ,

DVD-R ,DVD-ROM ,CD-RW ,CD-R ,DVD-RAM ,DVD-RW ,DVD+R and DVD+RW. Note that CD drives do not support DVD's or BD's and DVD drives do not support BD's. Also, the supported media types are different for a drive's read and write capabilities.

Interface: The interface that an optical drive uses and the port that it will use to connect to the system. The interfaces have transfer speeds of their own. For example, a max. of 167 MBps for IDE, 600 MBps for SATA. But, the current technologies available for optical drives can only provide speeds that are lower than modern systems. So in case, both the ports are available in your system, the interface is not much of a specification.

Buffer Size: The optical drive buffer works in exactly the same manner as the cache of a hard drive It stores a fraction of frequently accessed data that can be accessed extremely fast. It helps the system to access data from the drive even if the processor is being utilized 100% by other processes for a fraction of a second. Usually 1 or 2 or 4 MB.

Read & Write Speeds: All optical drives have different read and write speeds and different read or write speeds for different types of media. For example, DVD drives have a speed of 16x, 20x, 24x (where x is 1.35 MBps) and CD drives have a speed of 32x, 48x, 52x (where x is 150 KBps). An optical drive will always write different types of media at different speeds (For example, a CD at 48x, a DVD at 16x and a re-writable DVD at 4x). 

Ports for storage devices

Computer systems have a variety of secondary storage devices, some essential and the others optional. Some of these include hard-disk drives, optical drives, tape drives, floppy drives, etc.

For the transfer of data to and fro from the devices controllers are required to control the ports for connecting the devices. For the ports already present in the motherboard, usually the controller is on-board the motherboard too. The ports for hard-disk drives and optical drives include:

Parallel ATA (PATA/IDE):

• 40 pin cable and port
• max cable length: 45cm
• max number of hard drives: 4 (only in some motherboards, 2 per cable)
• max transfer speed: 133 MB/s

Serial ATA (SATA):

• 7 pin cable and port
• max cable length: 1m
• max number of hard drives: 8 (till now, one per cable)
• max transfer speed: 150-600 MB/s

SATA ports are fast replacing PATA ports. Controllers for extra ports like additional SATA or PATA ports, SCSI, USB, etc. that have been added via PCI card or similar are built on the PCI card itself.

There are ports for additional storage expansion as well like USB and SCSI. SCSI is mainly used with servers that have large arrays of hard-disk drives whereas USB controller is already present on the motherboard. The latest USB 3.0 specification is supposed to achieve 600 MB/s.