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Hard drives are getting so big they're almost scary. Who really needs 8 gigabytes of storage, much less one of those gargantuan 14GB drives that are shipping with Pentium II 350- and 400-MHz PCs these days? If you don't use your PC for more than a few basic applications, anything beyond 2GB is overkill. But then again, lots of people can argue that in terms of hard drive space, more is better. Consider, for example, Windows 98. Microsoft's latest operating system could consume 170MB--more than twice the real estate Windows 95 occupies. Also, if you regularly push your storage capacity to the limit by editing photographs or downloading video clips from the Web, it's worth looking into an upgrade. And you might as well make the upgrade a big one: Why buy a new 4GB hard drive for around $150 when you can get a 6.4GB drive for just $50 more?

We installed and performance-tested 13 EIDE hard drives from Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, Seagate, and Western Digital, ranging in size from 5.2GB to 12GB and costing from $199 to $399. We also tested the performance of (but didn't install) 4 EIDE models currently available only in brand-new PCs: Quantum's 8.4GB Fireball SE 8.4, Seagate's 9.1GB Medalist Pro 9140, and IBM's huge new 14.4GB Deskstar 14GXP and 16.8GB Deskstar 16GP. We didn't include SCSI drives because for most people, the performance boost SCSI provides isn't worth the hassle and expense. They're more difficult to install than EIDE models, and cost 30 to 50 percent more for the drive and $100 to $200 extra for a separate add-in controller.

Our findings? Although our Best Buys--Seagate's 6.4GB Medalist Pro 6451 and Maxtor's 8.4GB DiamondMax 2160--have a slight edge over the pack, just about any hard drive kit we tested is worth buying. Widely available by mail order or from local discount computer stores, upgrade kits typically contain everything you need for a painless upgrade: installation software (either on a disk or downloadable from a Web site), mounting brackets, and instructions. Anyone with some PC experience should be able to install a kit hard drive--even the behemoths--in 2 to 4 hours.

Beginners should probably stay away from the two Fujitsu drives we evaluated--the MPB3064AT and MPB3052AT. They are sold alongside other kits but lack the manuals and mounting hardware that the others have. Bare-bones drives like these can save you money if you're an old hand at hard drive installation and you're buying in volume. But if you've never installed a drive, do yourself a favor and buy a kit. The Fujitsu drives come with only a sliver of the documentation you get with other kits and don't include drive rails.

The Fireball SE 8.4, Medalist Pro 9140, and the two Deskstar drives should be available in kits by year's end. In the meantime, any of these four drives is worth asking for if you're buying a new PC. Dell, Gateway, and Micron offer them on their new systems. These cutting-edge drives consistently outperformed all the other drives in our file copy, file search, and video capture tests, thanks to some clever new technologies: The two IBM drives, endowed with new Giant MagnetoResistive drive heads, cram data more densely than other models. Quantum's Fireball SE and IBM's Deskstar 14GXP drives spin at 7200 rpm, speeding up the rate at which data can be read off the drive platters. The slowest drives we tested were Western Digital's Caviar AC 36400, a 5400-rpm model that captured fewer than 15 frames per second out of a possible 30 fps in our video test, and Quantum's 4000-rpm Bigfoot TX drives, which were slowest at copying and searching for files.