Advantages: Quiet, Fast, Cheap
Disadvantages: Not as fast as some, Do you really need so much space

...hard disks sometimes have a greater processor utilisation and hence may slow your computer down. Also faster disks are often louder. This disk only produces 2.5 bels of noise which is whisper quite. The other factor which is easy to compare is the interface. This comes in three main types and several subtypes. The main groups are SCSI, Serial ATA and normal ATA. SCSI hard disks are definitely the fastest, however they typically are 2 to 3 times the cost of the other types and in most systems the bottleneck would be in some other system. SCSI also has various compatibility issues since it comes in a whole variety of speeds. Also almost no computers support this by default so it is likely that one would also have to purchase a SCSI controller card. This disk uses serial ATA which runs at 150MB per second this is very fast for an average... Read review

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

...as a slower drive spinning at 5.400RPM would not be able to seek as quickly as a faster drive. Speeds: 5.400RPM (standard - home computing) 7.200RPM (fast - workstation/games) 10.000RPM (extremely fast - gaming servers) 15.000RPM (rare drives - not SATA based) Interface: PATA (old format hard drives - usualy extinct) ATA (fading format - still around, 100mbp/s) S-ATA (quite popular - 150mbp/s) S-ATAII (newest format - 300mbp/s) sometimes refered to as S-ATA-3G (some people beleive it transfers at 3GB's a second - not true) This drive is SATA-II and will keep you in the technology ring for quite a wile, as long as you have a SATA-II compatible motherboard) Hope you found this review useful?... Read review

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Advantages: Huge capacity, reasonably fast, 5 year warranty
Disadvantages: Not the fastest

...My laptop, a Dell 5150 is a fine machine (see review elsewhere on Ciao) but the 80Gb hard drive whilst big for a laptop is starting to get a bit cramped now I have both Windows XP and Vista on it so I've started looking around for a second hard drive so I can put Vista on one and leave XP on the other and then swap drives as needed. Luckily, following a previous hard drive failure, I have a spare caddy that the laptop needs so swapping drives would be a quick task, assuming I keep the tiny screwdriver needed handy in my rucksack! Laptop hard drives are smaller than normal - 2.5inch as opposed to 3.5 inch and tend to be at a price premium compared to the 'normal' sized drives, especially the bigger ones. They also tend to be much slower as they run at 4200RPM instead of 5600 or even 7200RPM that desktop ones run at. The reason being... 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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Advantages: Fast and silent
Disadvantages: None

...7 weeks ago i had an IBM hard drive die on me whilst my PC was booting up, it made lots of clicking sounds and failed to load into windows, trying to keep my temper i rushed down to my local PC world to see what i could pick up as i didnt want to be without my PC for more than a few hours. I decided upon buying the Samsung 40gb as it matched the spec of my previous IBM perfectly and my old hard drive was fine for what i needed it for until it packed up somewhat prematurely. The main spec of the Samsung is as follows... 40 gig storage space 7200 RPM 8.9 ms seek time UDMA/ATA 100 2mb buffer It also came with 2 features that my old IBM didnt... Noiseguard Impacguard The noise guard reduces noise output from the drive (makes it quieter) and impac guard means the hard drive is less susceptable to being damaged... Read review

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Advantages: cheap, easy to install, quiet
Disadvantages: no bundled software

...I bought the ST340810A – Seagates ATA-100 40Gb IDE 5400rpm hard drive when I was wanting to upgrade from a 20Gb Maxtor harddrive, and wanted a cheap and affordable hard drive. I paid ATS 1645 (around £75) for the drive, after having found this to be the lowest price for the drive on the consumer site geizhals.at (I get a lot of my hardware and software from places found here) from Goldadler – one of Austria’s cheapest computer retailers. Obviously this isn’t going to be the fastest kid on the block, being only a 5400 rpm drive (there are of course a lot of drives at 7200RPM) although funnily enough, this drive had a better average seek time that the 7200RPM model Seagate were offering with the same capacity (8.9ms average compared with 9ms average). It uses the Ultra ATA/100 interface, although there are patches available if your... Read review

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

...novice, it's best to let someone else do it for you. It comes with a one year warranty, which I feel is a little bit mean, hard disks should be something you can rely on to last considerably longer, but I'm sure it will anyway. Touch wood. It is cheap though, so we can't really complain on that one. If you are interested, here is the techy info: Rotational Speed 5,400 RPM (nominal) Buffer Size 2 MB Read Seek Time (Average) 8.9 ms Write Seek Time (Average) 10.9 ms (average) Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average) Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average) Average Latency 5.0 ms (nominal) Buffer To Disk 424.0 Mbits/s (Max) Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100.0 MB/s Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s Recommended.... Read review

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Advantages: excellent processign speed, Blue ray disk drive, excellent graphics memory
Disadvantages: very poor battery back-up

...Duo T9300 processor having excellent 2.5 GHz of clock speed. Front size data bus speed is about 800 MHz and the other rocking feature about this processor is its L2 cache size with total 6MB of superb cache size. This processor is best available processor for notebooks and Sony has provided in this notebook for thrilling gaming experience. Processor supports 64 bit computing technology so that go for future computing and gaming with high quality experience. **** Installed memory What Sony can give you better that is all here, RAM is a closed companion with processor and here is a good RAM also with 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM - 667 MHz RAM and maximum support capacity is also 4 GB. So that what maximum can be provided that is here. Here the speed of RAM is 667 MHz and processor has 800 MHz of data speed, RAM has slightly less speed but not a big... Read review

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Advantages: 250GB of internal memory!! At a reasonable price, too!
Disadvantages: No major disadvantages. Not as quiet as I believed it would be.

...I purchased this drive as an upgrade of my Acer Aspire laptop's 60GB 2.5" internal hard drive, and so far I have been delighted with it! The reason I chose this drive in particular, was due to the fact that it is an ATA drive (not SATA). ATA is the older drive technology, and as my Acer laptop is a few years old, it unfortunately does not support the more recent (and higher capacity) SATA internal drives. SATA drives are far more widespread now and are a bit easier and cheaper to find than the older ATA drives, but if you have an older laptop model, you will probably have to buy an ATA drive such as this one. After searching high and low, this 250GB drive from Western Digital was the highest capacity ATA internal drive I could find at a reasonable price, and so far it has not let me down! It took a bit of effort to clone my... Read review

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Advantages: Quite a fast drive.
Disadvantages: One of the "Deathstar" drives.

...Whether you are thinking of buying this drive (2nd hand, most likely as it's a couple of years old) or own one of IBM's 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models, read on for important information about issues with these drives and fixing them. ** THE DRIVE ** Capacity: 40 GB (38.3 GB as reported in windows) Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM Interface: ATA-100 Average seek time: 8.5 ms It's a fast enough drive. It seems to perform quite a bit better than the 5400 rpm 45 GB Western Digital drive I had, it's quite a bit quieter and this one's not dead ... yet. ** BORROWING NAMES FROM STAR WARS ** The main reason I thought I'd write a review on this drive, is to hopefully help a few others who have this or one of the other 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models (as I've read these are equally affected). It didn't take long for a lot of people... Read review

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