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

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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: 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

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Advantages: quick, very large, efficient internal hard drive
Disadvantages: opening up the pc tower - urgh!

...I really do love Western Digital hard drives as they deliver great performance and storage at very reasonable prices. This is no exception. This is a very cool and compact metal-cased storage device that works as well as you would expect from Western Digital, which means phenomenal performance at a great price. Design Its presented in a big box, and I was very relieved (and also surprised) to see how small it actually is! At 8cm in width, by 1.5 in height and 13 cm in depth, it fails to take up much space in your pc tower. Its a miniscule 105 gs which means i can hold it in one palm quite easily. The stainless steel enclosure case is attractive and i hardly notice the sounds it makes when transferring files, thats how quiet this metal box is! Instructions Opening up and setting the hard drive in was the biggest time... Read review

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

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Advantages: Large storage capacity , very fast, very quite in operation
Disadvantages: a bit bulky but hey i want the storage.

...The reason I brought this drive ? lets see now........ Its from a reliable manafacturer of hard drives. It has 250 GB of storage, it has 16Gb of Ram and its Sata II compliant. Installation was straightforward if your used to pulling stuff out of your PC and adding new bits. PERFORMANCE. Well for me it had a WOW factor of warp 10 very very fast I cant hear it operate have to check the light to make sure its seeking / writing .Took a while to format .....well its 250 GB so worth the wait. I have been using mine now for about 5 months I installed XP pro as the operating system and now its stuffed full of videos my whole CD collection web pages letters photos stuffed and theres still loads more space left to use. I am not going to get technical here if you want that read the manafacturers site. Just say its fast is working fine... 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, tidy cables, silent, runs cool.
Disadvantages: More money-wise to buy a 500gb drive?

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Advantages: Great Quality
Disadvantages: A bit old and slow now

...Frankly Western Digital Hard drives are some of the best in the world if you ask me. I have had 8 of them to date and have only bought more of them for either more space or different computers. I even plan to buy another 2 or 3 depending on how I want to reogranise my PC. All the western digital drives I have had, have always had excellent performance but possibly more importanly than that they have all be very reliable. The 200gb caviar in this review is no different at all. I've been using it for 2 years now and it not shown a single fault and has always responded with good transfer speeds to any other media format. I have just run a disc drive test to check on the drives write speed I have gotten a speed of 41.2MB/sec from a simple disc right/read program. Baring in mind though that this HDD is also currently running my Operating... Read review

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Advantages: Great speed, great storage space, low price, stability
Disadvantages: A little hot, A little noisy

...... Read review

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