Since your in CS, you'll appreciate this article
Agner`s CPU blog - Stop the instruction set war Some more "food for thought" on the Intel vs AMD war. (warning: Heavy geek content)
The new Western Digital Black drives have been getting some good press lately. I ordered two 1TB drives to replace some aging 500gig drives in my home server. SSD's haven't proven themselves to me yet, still nervous on the read write issues. Speed is one thing, but I'd rather have reliability.