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

...helps 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... 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: 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... Read review

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

...I knew we needed a new hard disk ages ago, as we were forever deleting things to make room for new things. You just never have enough space these days with the huge amount of MP3 files, photographs, and never ending amount of "useful" program installations. We put it off until the last minute, well until the old 10Gb hard disk started to fail. We chose the Western Digital Caviar 80Gb model for several reasons. Firstly the price, it happened to be on special offer from Dustins, which is a cheapish computer supplier here in Sweden. The equivalent UK price would be around 60 pounds, which included postage. It arrived within 2 days of ordering, which was great. No cables or instructions were supplied, just the basic hard drive unit, which looks pretty similar to most other hard disk units. It has the usual IDE connection, standard power... Read review

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Advantages: 250GB Lots of memory, Low power consumption, Cheap
Disadvantages: 2.5-inch limits it to USUALLY Laptops but can be used in desktop computers

...Fairly decent hard-drive. Western Digital are a well trusted company, especially for computer equipment. 250GB is a massive storage device, you could store ALOT and with low power consumption makes it even better. Looking at the prices too this is a real bargin! I really recommend this hard-drive, the real-time data protection will help if your computer ever shuts off. It is also a 2.5-inch hard-drive which usually associates with laptops, however there are some desktop computers which could use this. If you did want to buy this for a desktop computer but your computer could only use 3.5-inch then you could buy an external hard-drive shell which could plug straight into your computer OR laptop through USB or Firewire. Overall I think this is a very nice hard-drive and a good bargin at the price it's avaliable for.... Read review

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Advantages: Hard drive space is very cheap nowadays, and worth it for older PCs. Great manual
Disadvantages: Installation is difficult compared to other PC components

...I am currently in the middle of an 'upgrade everything on my PC' phase, and the latest thing to get the treatment was the hard drive. I decided that I would get another hard drive and add it as a companion to the existing one to save messing around with reinstalling windows on the new drive. After doing a little research on the internet, I finally decided that all hard drives are pretty much the same nowadays, and the only variances you get are in the size of the disk, the price, and the noise they make when they are running. I went onto the website of a reputable firm on the internet then, and ordered their top selling model. I reasoned that if it was the top seller it would at least be reliable, and would probably be cheap to boot. I came away with an 80Gb Western Digital Drive, even though I had never previously heard... Read review

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Advantages: Huge Capacity, Fast, Silent
Disadvantages: Hard to think of any!

...itself and with the disk defragmenter it can arrange files for better performance. You could digitalize all your music collection or maybe make backups of CDs incase they get damanged. The possiblities are endless, and with a drive this size, you don't need to keep constantly looking in My Computer to check your drive space! The drive is very quiet, I'm yet to hear one click or whistle from it. It's been very stable since I've had it, and it features SMART technology to help you find errors before they cause too much damage. My drive didn't actually come with an instruction manual, which I found odd, however there were instructions on the side of the box which gave the basics (how to install the drive). I couldn't recommend this drive enough!... Read review

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Advantages: Portable, easy to use, never failed on me yet!
Disadvantages: Perhaps only the disc size, but it has taken me 2 years to fill it!

...Wester Digital, a respected brand name, and i agree! I have owned the unit now for around 2 years, and have 0 problems. My internal hard drive has died on me twice but my external one, never! This 80gb HDD is perfect for storing large files, home movies, photo albums, music etc. It's ideal when transfering data from one place to another, simply unplug it, plug it in elsehwre and hey presto! It supports drag & drop so moving files couldn't be easier. Standard power adpater with 3-pin plug, and USB 2.0 connection to your pc, mac, server etc. It is easily recognised by each operating system and i have yet to find one that doesn't support the unit. Plug it in, wait around 30secs and it's up and running. Can be stored horizontally, and if you have 3 like me, you can stack them perfectly, or store them vertically... Read review

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