Top 5 IDE Desktop Hard Drives

Seagate is the first company to use perpendicular recording with their new Barracuda 7200.10 series hard drive. By stacking the bits magnetic poles on end rather than flat, more data can be packed onto a disc thus allowing the drive to have its incredible 750GB capacity. The drive outperforms pretty much any other IDE drive on the market as well, but the price is fairly high.

While Seagates Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive offers some of the largest capacities out of the IDE hard drive market, their 7200.10 500GB offers some of the best value. Performance with the 500GB version is quite strong but the price per gigabyte is nearly unbeatable in the marketplace right now.

While Seagate and other manufacturers may be pushing the capacity of drives, Western Digital has a solid reputation for performance and reliability with their Caviar line of drives. The Caviar SE16 500GB may not have the highest capacity, but its performance is solid and the prices are not that far behind those of the Barracuda 7200.10 500GB.

Hitachi was the first company to release a hard drive with a 500GB capacity. Even though the DeskStar is quite old compare to many other models, performance is still good even with the 8MB buffer compared to the 16MB on most new drives. The one thing is does have going for it is reliability, something that still needs to be seen with the new perpendicular drives.

Samsung has bee slow in upgrading the capacities to their hard drive lineup. In fact, the highest capacity IDE based drive from the company is the 400GB Spinpoint T133. While the drive doesn't have the highest capacity, prices are generally much more favorable and it does better in terms of low noise and heat operation than the larger capacity drives. This is a good alternative to the larger drives especially in situations such as a home theater PC.