The editors at PC World are running a contest through the end of the month offering some lucky reader a “dream” PC. This is a custom desktop machine they thought up that would cost about $30,000 to build.

As usual, I ambled through the description of this computer and thought to myself, what the heck is this stuff?!

So I’m going to spend a few blog entries dissecting some of the more interesting components from the list.

First up, the system will contain two OCZ Technology 64GB internal solid state disks. What stopped me was the price tag: $3,000. Holy-moly! That means each disk will be $1,500. Could a drive really be worth that much?!

Why is the OCZ worthy of going into a dream PC? Here are the company specs:

• Read up to 58MB/second (very fast compared to a traditional hard drive, which has mechanical parts to it)
• Write up to 35MB/second (same here)
• Slim 2.5″ design (making it small enough for a notebook computer)
• Lightweight 77g (less than 3 ounces)
• Low power consumption (which means your notebook battery will last longer)
• Shock resistant 1500G (which makes it durable for hauling around)
• High-capacity 64GB (not a bad size for a drive, but I can see why PC World plans to double that)
• RAID support (makes sense when you have two drives in the machine)
• MTBF 2 million hours (always just an estimate, but this particular meantime between failures equates to about 228 years; expected when you don’t have any moving parts)
• 1 year warranty (you’d think the company would go longer than this if they really believed their own hype about durability)

One other advantage of the solid state drive. They’re the Prius of the drive world — incredibly quiet even when they’re in operation.

Of course, there’s that price. That’s the primary disadvantage. The cost is about $18 per gigabyte vs. $2 or less for a hard drive. The new MacBook Air notebook has an optional solid state disk that adds just about $1,000 to the price.

Considering that solid state drives are real plus for notebooks but offer a lot of benefits that are sort of irrelevant to desktop machines, classify this particular feature as truly dream-machine worthy.

Posted on March 11th, 2008 by dian