Buyers' Guide to Hard Drives

If you work mostly in standard office programs, nearly any drive will do. But speed counts for multimedia authoring.

By Sean Captain, PCW Print

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Maxtor DiamondMax D540X

Best current price: $54.00

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Seagate 80GB EIDE ULTRA ATA 100 9.5MS 7200RPM BARRACUDA

Best current price: $30.00

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Maxtor DiamondMax 80GB EIDE 5400RPM UDMA 100 3.5LP (Maxtor-4K080H4)

The stunning capacity of today's hard drives--which doubles every 12 to 18 months--has made it possible, even economical, to turn a PC into a multimedia machine holding gobs of audio and video files. And drives of 200GB or more should be out by the time you read this.

Internal hard drives with Serial ATA connections have thin cables that make more-compact computer designs possible. The technology won't become common for at least another year, however. (See "Your Next Hard Drive" for more information.)

Though our tests show that today's hard drives all perform about the same when running regular business applications, people who work with large images and digital video greatly benefit from speedy drives. In our tests with Adobe Photoshop, for example, a system fitted with the fastest drive completed a complex task (applying filters and rotating an image multiple times) almost 30 percent quicker than did the same system with the slowest drive installed.

Top 10 Hard Drives (chart)