The Caviar 'BB' series disks from Western Digital are designed to be good, solid mid-level drives with decent all-round performance. They differ significantly from their siblings they're faster than the Protg 'EB' disks (which run at 5,400rpm compared to the BB's 7,200rpm) but they don't have as large a cache as the 'JB' Caviar SEs (2MB compared to 8MB).

What this means is that while they're generally strong performers, they don't quite have the grunt to beat the IBM Deskstars hands down. We received three drives from the Caviar series for testing: the 40GB, 60GB and 80GB models. The
40GB and 80GB models managed to compete quite well with their IBM counterparts, turning up respectable Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity scores in SYSmark2002.

As a whole, all three of these drives came roughly equal in DiskSpeed 32, with an average read rate of 40.5MB/s: 5% faster than the IBM Deskstars and 12% faster than Seagate's Barracudas.

Although all three drives are good buys, you might want to avoid the 60GB model from this series, because it didn't quite have the real-world performance of the 40GB and 80GB models, despite clocking almost identical access time scores.

In our SYSmark2002 testing it rated well below the 80GB model, which itself rated well behind the 40GB model.

If you are looking to purchase one of these drives it is worth comparing capacity versus price and performance, as the cost of these drives fluctuates heavily depending on capacity.The 80GB drive is the pick of the lot at only $2.69 per GB, (which also makes it the cheapest drive in the round-up), while the 40GB model is very expensive at $3.88/GB.

Also,Western Digital's utility software is still incompatible with Windows XP (the XP version is listed as coming soon on Western Digital's Website) so you'll have trouble if you're planning on migrating your operating system to a Western Digital hard drive.

Overall, the Caviar 'BB' disk range is a strong offering from Western Digital. If you're shopping for a drive that offers good performance and high capacity at a reasonable price, then the 80GB model is the best of the three and a steal at only $215.