Hard drives used to be the coolest thing - in the olden days, when all home PCs were slow, a hard drive was often a measure of how 'good' your computer was. For quite sometime, however, processor and graphics technology stole the limelight. Hard drives have been taken for granted - an ambient component that accompanies your sparkling graphics card and gi-normous heat sink.

Not long ago both Intel and the underdog, AMD, battled to reach the coveted and psychologically significant 1GHz mark. When the AMD Athlon reached the landmark first - it marked a new era in c