Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750 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 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

Advantages: Fast, Large Storage, Cheap, Clever, Reliable, Easy install
Disadvantages: n/a

...this drive compeet with faster drives (WD raptor 10krpm) but for around £50-60 knock 2 of them in Raid-0 and you will most likely have a very large, very fast drive setup for £40-50 less than a faster drive! I would suggest if you're in the market for a large, reliable, quitet drive you realy do need to look at Western Digital's 250GB SE16 Drive as this drive ranks at the top of the hard drive food chain, and is industry standard coming from WD who are renowned for their quality and the life span of their products. Western digital SE (special edition) is another way of stating that this drive has 16mb of cache instead of the usual 8mb (overall faster performance for sustained use, ie network storage) The drive spins at 7.200RPM (rotations per minute) which is usualy classed as the norm for higher end hard drives, where as a slower drive... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful