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Top 10 Hard Drives

That great sucking sound is your hard drive being consumed by applications, MP3 files, and digital images. Here's ten choices for giving your PC new breathing room.

Richard Baguley

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Looking for a hard drive with extraordinary capacity and a fair price? Our Best Buy award for hard drives over 50GB goes to the 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax D540X, which has the second lowest price per gigabyte on the chart. (The lowest is held by the 160GB version of the same model.) A close second is the 100GB Western Digital Special Edition Caviar, which boasts outstanding speed scores and has an 8MB memory buffer, four times the size of the buffers of the other drives on the chart.

The idea behind the bigger buffer is to provide more "hits" on data stored in the drive's cache, saving the additional time it takes to retrieve them from the disk. However, the Special Edition Caviar is not cheap: At $349 it's the second most expensive drive on the chart, and at $3.49 per gigabyte, its actual storage cost is the highest--ranging from about 15 to 80 percent more than that of the other contenders. Western digital has also recently launched a 120GB version of this drive. It costs $389, but it was unavailable for testing at review time.

If you have more modest needs, our second Best Buy was awarded to another Maxtor. The DiamondMax Plus D740X is the most expensive of the three 40GB drives on our chart. But based on our tests, it is significantly faster than its two competitors.

All ten of our chart makers come with installation kits--typically they include an IDE cable, mounting screws, and other hardware that might be required to install the drive into a PC's 3.5-inch drive bay. Maxtor's kit adds extra brackets so that you can install its drive into a 5.25-inch bay--useful if all of your 3.5-inch drive bays are full.

All of the kits we looked at have comprehensive setup guides that are easy for the average PC user to understand and come with software that helps you configure and format the drive. Only the Seagate drives, however, came with software for backing up data or moving your files to the new drive. While all the drives on the chart are backward-compatible with the older, slower types of drive interface such as ATA/33 and support Ultra ATA/100, only Maxtor's drives support the newer Ultra ATA/133 interface.

As of now, however, the capability to use ATA/133 is not a compelling selling point. This new interface increases the burst speed for data transmission between the drive and PC from 100MB per second to 133MB per second. But very few PCs come with built-in ATA/133 support.

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