jrockway's Journal: Hard Drive Failures, New Computer

I think I finally learned something on slashdot.

Apparently bad power supplies cause a lot of PC hardware failure. Which, to me, explains a problem that many of my PC-using friends have had -- they get a new hard drive, and it dies. Then they get another one, and it dies. They keep dying. I had always wondered why their hard drives died, and mine never did. Well, I think it's because of power supplies. I've always used Macs (which use "better" hardware), but my friends build their machines themselves. They, trying to save money, get bad power supplies I think this is the root of their problems.

Also, I'm planning to build a computer soon (like this week), and am ylooking for advice on hardware.

Right now I've selected the following components at TigerDirect (anyone know of a better dealer? I have no idea):

CP2-XP25003BC AMD Athlon XP2500+ / 512KB Cache / 333MHz FSB / Socket A / Barton Core / Processor
S450-2026 Soyo - SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Socket-A ATX Motherboard Supporting DDR 333/400 and 8x AGP Pro
P450-7233 XFX GeForce4 MX440 128MB DDR 8X AGP with TV & DVI Video Card
A901-2006 Apex ATX12V 450W Power Supply

I also have a 20G hard drive and 2 40G hard drives that I'll put in. I hope I can put the 40Gs together on RAID and have an 80G /home partition (probably with a symlink from /usr too).

Any advice?