While a good hard disk isn't likely to elicit the same 'wow!' response that a new CPU or graphics card will generate, without a hard disk drive, your PC would be nothing more than a stupidly fast pocket calculator. A hard disk drive is an essential component; after all, before hard disk drives, PCs had to boot DOS from one floppy disk, and then load apps or games from another. Disk drives also affect your PC's performance, determining how long apps and games take to load, and how quickly your PC boots up.
Choosing a hard disk is much like choosing memory. First, you decide what capacity you want/need, and then you select the best model. However, this isn't nearly as easy as it looks, despite hard disks being marketed as members of a series. This is because, despite often having similar model names, there's frequently little commonality between two drives from the same series. For example, the Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 series comprises 12 models, which span two different interfaces (EIDE and S-ATA II), four different capacities (250, 320, 400 and 500GB) and two buffer sizes (8MB and 16MB). To further complicate matters, drives with different capacities also have different areal and track densities, which have a massive effect on performance.
We've rounded up the major models of every current generation of S-ATA II hard disk, ranging from a minuscule 74GB drive to a titanic 750GB model. However, instead of writing individual reviews of each disk (which would quickly become extremely repetitive), we've arranged the reviews by capacity, so you can be sure of buying the best drive for your PC.
Author: James Gorbold
Hard drives - 500GB