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The high-end specification stretches to the storage as well. Alienware has installed a total of three hard disks in the Aurora 7500 - two of these are 250GB units that have been striped into a RAID 0 array. The RAID array is used as the system boot volume, while the second drive is configured as a data volume. Now, you'd expect the third drive to also be a 250GB unit, but Alienware has instead installed a 500GB drive. This means that if you were worried about data integrity your could backup the entire boot volume to the third disk. Personally I would just make sure that all my data is kept safe on the third half-terabyte drive, so if the RAID array did ever fail I'd just have to reinstall Winodws and my applications.

All three drives are mounted on quick release drive rails and there are two more bays below, with the rails already in place for future upgrades. There are four 5.25in bays on offer, two of which are already filled. Alienware has installed an NEC ND-3550A DVD writer in the top most bay - this is a great drive, although the more recent ND-4550A would have been preferable with its DVD-RAM support. Bizarrely Alienware has also included a CD-RW drive - I can't really understand why this is here since the NEC DVD writer will happily burn CD-R and CD-RW media as fast as you'd ever need it. In fact I can't even remember the last time I've seen a bog standard CD-RW drive. Finally, one of the two 3.5in bays is filled with a floppy drive - although this may seem strange at first, if you're using a RAID array as your boot disk it's always handy to have a floppy drive.

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