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

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

One of the cheapest 500GB drives here, but this is reflected in the lack of features and slow transfer speeds.

The miracle of pocket portable data continues, with more storage in a smaller physical space.

Blisteringly fast but expensive for the capacity

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

Why is this external hard drive different from all other external hard drives?

Behemoth server and PC storage, with reliability features too.

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.

Narrowly edged out of the winning position by the extremely capable Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 drive, this drive has plenty to crow about.

Western Digital markets this drive as a special edition drive for higher performance needs, but in our labs, not only has it been beaten by all other SATA drives, but its own IDE counterpart.

The Caviar WD2500JB is a big 250GB, and is one of three drives to breach the $500 mark. It is $80 cheaper than the WD2500JD SATA drive. Despite the three-year warranty, it’s not exactly great value; in fact, like the W2500JD, this drive carries a high gigabyte-per-dollar value.

Why are we reviewing something that is a mere 36GB? Simple -- because this one drops access times and pumps up the transfer rate. Not targeted at the home user, the 36GB WD Raptor is marketed as an enterprise-level SATA drive -- the fastest drive on offer by WD. Capacity becomes an afterthought for the Raptor with its 10,000rpm spindle concerning itself with speed, resulting in seek times of around 5.2ms, compared to the 8.9ms of a 7,200rpm drive.

While the storage community eagerly awaits Serial ATA disks (see page 39), the latest generations of Ultra ATA disks have emerged, boasting huge capacities and searing performance.

The Caviar 'BB' series disks from Western Digital are designed to be good, solid mid-level drives with decent all-round performance.

Western Digitals new 8MBbuffer line of Caviar drives proved to be a tough act to match.

if you are looking for a top performance drive with a reasonable capacity and terrific price, then the Western Digital Expert simply cannot be beaten.

When it comes to choosing the right hard disk for you, there are several factors that you have to consider.