Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500 GB > Reviews

Advantages: Fast and cheaper than others
Disadvantages: can always be cheaper

...price of one of these western digital 500gb HDs) and also the running temp and noise of raptors are enough to warrent a purchase of the WD 500gb hard drive over any Raptor. Seeing as raptors are out of the Question (in my own opinion, although others will agree with me) you could go for something cheaper, but like i said, as you go down in price the value goes down a lot. For about 15 pounds less you end up with much slowers drives that dont have ... Read review

Advantages: Quick, reliable, cheap and lots of space
Disadvantages: The OEM unit comes without SATA cables or screws.

I bought the OEM edition, that is an original equipment manufacturer version. These do not come in a retail box and have no accessories with them. The actual hard drive itself is strong, well built and reassuringly heavy. This is a SATAII Hard drive but since i had an asrock dual-vsta motherboard i was hoping it would be suitably backwards compatible with SATA1 standards of 150mbps theoretical bandwidth. I had no need to change any jumper settings ... Read review

Having used Western Digital before, I had very high expectations when I bought one of these drives. Thankfully, my expectations were met! Previously, I had a 36GB Raptor as my primary drive, storing my OS, Apps and Games, allowing for very fast loading times. Raptors were some of the fastest drives in the world, but were limited by their small capacity. In the new generation of hard drives, this limitation has been removed - my new 500GB Western Digital drive is actually fast than the old Raptor, with more than 10 times the capacity, all for the same price! The new hard drive is also quieter and cooler. I would recommend these HDDs to anybody - they are massive, cool, quiet and fast.