Western Digital WD5000AAKS (500 GB)

Pros: Inexpensive way to get a fast, reliable hard drive to supplement or be primary storage.

Cons: You need to be or become SATA or SATA II compatible.

The Bottom Line: This is a keeper and a very rare 5 star from me. It answered the issues I had at a relatively nominal cost.

Review: Once upon a time, a man nicknamed Mongo had an 80GB SATA internal hard drive that came stock in his trusty, antique < b>Dell Dimension 4700 PC Desktop . Not so quickly, it became full to the point where virtual ...

Pros: Pretty quick, cheap price

Cons: Can get a bit hot, failed once (the one inside my external drive)

The Bottom Line: 500GB for the right price, and good performance to boot.

Review: With 500GB hard drives still the sweet spot for the best price/size ratio, it's been a very long time since hard drive prices had any dramatic changes in price. So with that, I went ahead and did a quick search around and decided to purchase from a ...

Pros: Quiet. Fast in RAID 0. Very inexpensive. Huge capacity.

Cons: Ordinary seek times per disk.

The Bottom Line: Puts the 'I' (inexpensive) in 'RAID' without sacrificing anything.

Review: I'm building a new system and wanted to make it as fast as I could out of the gate, so I got a WD1500ADFD 10,000-rpm SATA 150 drive because I wanted to see how the extremely low seek-times affected the feeling of speed. It was fast, no doubt, even ...