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Latest Technology Improvements Drive Storage Capacities Upward While Pushing Down The Price Per Gigabyte.

If your collection of databases, e-mail messages, backup files, digital photos, and videos is threatening to make your hard drive pop at the seams, you might want to add a second one. Would, say, an extra 160 gigabytes fit the bill?

Less than a year ago, a $300, 80GB desktop drive was considered huge; today you can find a 160GB drive for the same price. Even if that much storage sounds like overkill in your PC, you'll still benefit from the improved drive technologies that are helping to push prices down on smaller-capacity hard drives, too.

Big Spinners

We tested IBM's 120GB, 7200-revolutions-per-minute Deskstar 120GXP; Western Digital's 120GB, 7200-rpm WD1200BB WD Caviar; and Maxtor's 160GB, 5400-rpm DiamondMax D540X.

Because of its slower rotational speed, the Maxtor hard drive often lagged behind the others in our tests. Of our two 7200-rpm models, the IBM Deskstar 120GXP excelled when copying files and folders; executing tasks in Photoshop; and running our file find test. The Western Digital Caviar, on the other hand, finished copying our large file 40 percent faster.

At a suggested retail price of $300--less than $2 per gigabyte--the Maxtor is the best bargain, despite its slightly slower execution.

The suggested retail prices for the Western Digital and the IBM are $300 and $350, respectively, which break down to about $2.50 and $3 per gigabyte. Users hungry for speed will find paying the premium worthwhile.

Need That Much?

Not everyone needs a massive hard drive, though digital video editors can attest to video files' storage-gobbling potential. Even in a compressed format, digital video consumes about 3.6MB per second, or 13GB per hour.

If your interests lean toward photo editing, a 40GB drive may be adequate, says John Monroe, an analyst with Gartner Dataquest. And thanks to technology developed for their larger brethren, smaller drives are dropping in price.

Areal density is the amount of data that can be squeezed onto one hard-drive platter. Since August 1998, areal density has grown 1000 percent--from 4GB to 40GB per platter. It should reach 80GB per platter by mid-2002, Monroe says.

Because the platters are expensive, using fewer of them decreases the manufacturing costs. Thus, for example, if a two-platter 40GB drive sold for $150 in 2001, a single-platter 40GB drive will sell for less than $100 in 2002, he says.

Before you forgo a larger drive, however, Monroe suggests considering your future usage. A 40GB drive may sound big, but more-pervasive broadband and multimedia options could fill it fast.

And with 80GB platters looming, before long a 40GB drive will seem quaint.