Best Serial ATA Hard Drives

If you want the highest capacity in a single drive, then the undisputed leader right now is the Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 with its 4TB hard drive. It is the first drive to reach this capacity providing 33% more space than the previous 3TB drives. The capacity does come somewhat at a cost to performance though as the drive spins at the slower 5400rpm rate but this does help keep the noise from the drive to a minimum. With this large capacity, it is best to use this drive on 64-bit operating systems to fully utilize the drive. Prices for the drive start around $320. If you want a bit more performance at a lower price, than the Seagate Barracuda 3TB with a price of $270 is a good alternative.

The best value for a hard drive is one that gives you the best storage for the price. This is typically calculated by the price divided by the storage to yield a price per gigabyte. When using this, the best overall choice for value is the Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drive. Priced consistently around $120, it comes in with a very low $.06/GB. It doesn't compare to the higher performance drives that spin at 7200rpm but it does perform very well for a 5400rpm drive albeit a bit louder. Perfect for adding some additional storage or using as a backup drive. If you are looking to get a bit more capacity, then the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB at $200 is a good option but you really need a 64-bit version of Windows to fully use the drive.

Performance is typically determined by the overall spin rate of the drive and the data density. The controllers on the drive can also make a difference particularly if the drive is going to be used for certain tasks such as databases that require a lot of non-sequential data access. For tasks like this, the lower capacity but faster spinning Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB drive offers the best overall performance. In fact, the drive is really a 2.5-inch drive designed for enterprise use that comes in a special 3.5-inch drive tray to help with cooling. Pricing ranges from $250 to $300. If you need capacity as well as performance, than the Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB offers a significantly larger capacity with a similar price of roughly $250.

RAID is a configuration that uses multiple drives to enhance performance, data reliability or both. Because the drives work in tandem and rely on having similar specs to ensure the best overall performance in the array, the drives require a bit more. Those looking to put together a RAID array would be well served by looking at Western Digital's Enterprise RE4 drives. These drives are specially designed to be put into RAID arrays. The 2TB versions are currently the largest available and offer solid performance and 5 year warranties. Prices are pretty crazy for this drive though with ranges of $300 to $450. Since most consumer RAID uses don't necessarily require this level of performance, just about any other drive in this list in a pair will work well and probably be more affordable.

Thanks to the flooding in Thailand, pricing for sub-terabyte drives are now as high or higher than many terabyte and larger drives. Still, there are some situations where having a drive smaller than a terabyte might be needed. One of the few drives that wasn't overly priced right now is the Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB with a price tag of $90. This is very high at $.18/GB which makes it a poor value overall but consumers have little choice right now. The drive does spin at 7200rpm but has a lower cache than the nearly double the price Black version. If you want more capacity without getting too much more expensive, than the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D 750GB can be found for around $100.