Hard drive - 6 GB - standard - IDE

Advantages: Fast and Silent, Easy SATA installation, Two flavours to choose from
Disadvantages: Dismal performance

...Maxtor are one of the 3 leading hard drive manufacturers in the personal and business computing market at the moment along with Western Digital and Hitachi. They are also the cheapest. Unfortunately, the saying that price doesn't equals quality is true here. Too true. The 160GB version of the DiamondMax Plus9 can be purchased online from around £51.00 onwards. And with the way hard drive prices have fallen recently, that's not bad at all. But as I said, you're getting cheap quality to match the cheap price. The drive itself looks very similar to any other hard drive, and comes in both IDE ATA/133 and SATA 150 flavours, with the SATA ones easier to configure due to their jumperless installations. My personal experience with this drive has been short. I first purchased this drive to use in my first ever custom-built computer... Read review

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Advantages: very fast, stable, read and wirte speeds
Disadvantages: not very many, low end of the market

..., power and flat data cables for the IDE interface. Some extra language CDs were also included, for users of other countries. ▼Features and options▼ This hard drive was 200GB, above the standard for most hard drives around at the moment. This is enough space for anybody, personal use, home use, power users, and professional users. I use it mainly for video editing, as I said above, and it’s very suitable for this because of the high reading/writing speeds of it. It’s got speeds of up to 7200RPM, this is about the standard for most hard drives for today, you can get some faster but there isn’t really much point as you won’t notice the difference anyway. With a 150MB/PS transfer speed, you can’t really go wrong for speed and also it’s very good for newer computers as they take full advantage of this, therefore getting... Read review

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Advantages: Price, speed, quietness
Disadvantages: Installation in older PC maybe tricky

...I knew we needed a new hard disk ages ago, as we were forever deleting things to make room for new things. You just never have enough space these days with the huge amount of MP3 files, photographs, and never ending amount of "useful" program installations. We put it off until the last minute, well until the old 10Gb hard disk started to fail. We chose the Western Digital Caviar 80Gb model for several reasons. Firstly the price, it happened to be on special offer from Dustins, which is a cheapish computer supplier here in Sweden. The equivalent UK price would be around 60 pounds, which included postage. It arrived within 2 days of ordering, which was great. No cables or instructions were supplied, just the basic hard drive unit, which looks pretty similar to most other hard disk units. It has the usual IDE connection, standard power... Read review

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