When it comes to choosing the right hard disk for you, there are several factors that you have to consider. First of all, the primary role of the drive, whether it's as your primary drive with your OS and applications running from it, or whether it is to be used as a second drive for data storage. For the first you need high performance, and for the second you need high capacity, and for both you need the best value for money. While some drives excel at one of these roles, they often make some kind of compromise in a particular area in an attempt to sweep the field in another. The Western Digital Caviar, on the other hand, while being a little smaller in capacity than the average drive in this month's Labs, manages to offer terrific performance, high capacity and an excellent price, making it an easy choice for PC Authority's Value Award.

Even though it only has a 5,400rpm spindle speed, the huge 2Mb data buffer helps the Caviar along in performance terms, especially in the PC Authority Benchmarks, although in Threadmark the Caviar simply couldn't compete with the range of 7,200rpm drives on test. Whether you are looking for an inexpensive but speedy primary drive, or something just for budget mass storage, then the Western Digital Caviar is a drive which is hard to beat.