Great design, but average performance lets it down.

Quick, cheap and light: the best 3.5in drive in the group.

Stylish and versatile, its only drawback is the mammoth price

Western Digital MyBook Home Edition

A solid, assured drive with plenty of interfaces and enough style to justify the price.

An large capacity extrenal drive that looks like something out of the Guggenheim.

Western Digital has announced its range of 250GB SATA laptop hard drives, and we have the first unit in the country under the microscope.

Another laptop hard drive series moves toward perpendicular storage.

Blisteringly fast but expensive for the capacity

Good value and high capacity, but performance is average

Huge capacity, but not very quiet or good value

High capacity, good performance and affordable. The Caviar is a great alternative to the Samsung

Another drive to feature both SATA and Molex power connectors on the rear of the unit, this drive offers both backwards compatibility with suitable motherboards and future native SATA power supplies.

Although boasting the lowest average access time in the roundup at 12.2ms, looking at this drive's graphs, we notice a few more hiccups along the way than its big brother the 400GB Deskstar 7K400.

Finishing in line with the WD2000 SATA, the two jostled places and they both offer a trade off. The WD drive performs marginally better, a 0.8ms lag separating the two.

A $300 price tag makes this the most expensive of the 160GB drives we tested, but its cost per gigabyte is still well under $2.

The performance of this 200GB SATA drive was average. However, despite a three-year warranty, this fell into the lower bracket when it came to value

The Barracuda ST3160023AS is a fair performer in our labs, ranking fourth and above average when it came to handling the binary.