WD Caviar Blue WD4000AAKS 400 GB

Advantages: Lots of space, cheap, reliable
Disadvantages: Can't hoenstly think of any

...If we look at the name of this device, 'Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB', we can infer a great deal of information. 'Western Digital' is the manufacturer, 'Caviar' is the produce line, 'SE16' tells us that this is a special edition device with a 16Mb (1Mb = 1024Kb, 1Kb = 1024b) cache, 'WD2500KS' is the model number and 250Gb is the device size in raw data format. Western Digital are a good company and in fact I buy all of my hard drives from them because they have never failed on me. The Caviar device line has been in operation for about six years and has included IDE devices as well as the newer SATA and SATAII devices. The special edition bit of that means effectively nothing, it is simply a marketing thing, but the 16Mb cache is very important. Normally hard drives have an 8Mb cache and used to have a 2Mb cache... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable, cheap
Disadvantages: Can't think of any

...not for there are settings on the back that allow the device to slow down to SATAI speeds. So if your using a SATA system and your thinking maybe you will upgrade to SATAII in the future this would work for you. Western digital are great company, I always buy my hard drives from them because I have never had one fail on me. This particular device is an 80Gb derivative and will contain a maximum of 74Gb of data when formatted using NTFS. When a drive is made it is not formatted. The idea of formatting is to allow your computer to know where it has stored its data on the device. As such a large table is made which compares the location on the hard drive to the data stored there this takes up about 8% of your overall space. NTFS is just a file system standard and doesn't need to mean much to most people. I have shown the sequential read/write speeds... Read review

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Advantages: Fast read/write, 7200rpm spindle speed
Disadvantages: Only 2mb data buffer, Only supports upto ATA100

...Having already owned several western digital hard drives before, i knew these would be pretty reliable. Installation was fairly easy - four screws, one data cable, and one power cable connection. The bios on the motherboard recognised the drive perfectly. Once installed and setup, i noticed the difference over my old hard drive straight away. The boot up speed was a lot quicker and i once again had space for all my bits and pieces(after i had sorted windows out). (just for reference my old drive was a 20gb 2mb Cache 5400rpm). For any one not into the techie side of things, the faster the spindle speed and the bigger the cache size, the Faster the drive. Although 40gb doesnt sound very big compared to the other sizes available, you can still hold a lot of information on a drive of this size.... Read review

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