Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320 GB

Advantages: Fast, Cheap,Reliable
Disadvantages: a little hot, a little noisy

...As a computer geek I used many Hard Drives drives until this one and I'm finally satisfied. As a multitasking user i open many programs at the same time: antivirus, internet, multiple downloads, winamp and even gaming at the same time and often I even game sometimes and this hdd really does a good job. The 320GB (290 Gb actually) are sufficient for storage and comes at a very decent price. The wd hard drives are really reliable, not a single problem until now in 2 months of usage. The transfer rates are insane: 80 Mb max at data read and 75 Mb max at data write, about 13 ms access time. The temperatures are pretty hot in summer, I recommend cooler. It is a little noisy but are far more noisier hard drives on the market Stability: 4 full days of massive downloads, in summer is enough for you?! Overall: great hdd drive... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Fast, tidy cables, silent, runs cool.
Disadvantages: More money-wise to buy a 500gb drive?

...I purchased this drive about 3 months ago from eBuyer, taking advantage of the £10 off offer they had going with Google Checkout. This was my first SATA drive, my existing two being IDE. I figured a hard drive was just there to store data, so I didn't care about the interface or speed. How wrong I was. So for looks, well, they're all the same, until of course you come to the cables. The thin SATA cable instantly frees your system of the clutter made from intertwining IDE strips. If you like to show off, with a windowed case, or if you just like to have things organised then move to SATA just for this reason alone if you've yet to. So after plugging in, the drive is recognised straight away in POST, and once loaded the Windows Setup, the drive is formatted to 298GB (298 Gigabytes = 319,975,063,552 bytes). The format process took... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

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

.... This is a serious buy, its not that much slower than enterprise hard drives like raptors. Raptors spin faster (10k rpm vs 7.2k rpm) and have lower latency but these benefits hardly show up to the average user at home and the drawbacks of much less HD capacity (36gb for the 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 much capacity. These drives deserve an award for such performance price ratio as well as capacity price ratio.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful