Good article. It would bhave been nice to see the specs and comparisons in tabular format, and to include the RPM, cache, power consumption, and heat & noise.

Somehow, the WD read speed seems way too slow. I wonder if that is just an anomaly. In the past, Crystal Mark has given me wildly different results on the same empty hard drives. Perhaps that is just the nature of the beast.

I have a harddrive of 220 gigas on my ASUS 1215N with Win 7. I am a light gamer, considering the low performance, have about 20 Steam titles, a big university folder and a full set of freeware software for video editing, playing and internet browsing. I still have 110 gigas of free space after using it for 15 months. If I had a gaming PC, that would fill with modern games, but I don't need it for anything else. I could uninstall games to save space for others. I don't save any videos, pictures or MP3s on my harddrive. They are all on Youtube of Photobucket. I would also burn them to a CD. I favor the fastest hard drives for hard core gamers, that don't have to have more than 160 gb of space. Like OCZ IBIS 160 Gb SDD, which should be half the price of 450 euros.

No mention of which drives power down after a period of inactivity?