Best Hard Drive for under £50

This is a bit over £50 but it's worth a look:

WD6401AALS - Western Digital CAVIAR BLACK 640GB SATA/300 7200RPM (WD6401AALS)

For 3 reasons:

1. 640GB is larger than 500GB
2. 640GB guarantees that it uses 2 333GB platters, which is much higher aerial density than 500GB HDD which uses 2 platters of 250GB. This means that 640GB HDD has sighnificant performance advantage in terms of transfer speed.
3. WD is same in league in terms of reliability as Segate

Otherwise, you may look at
WD6400AAKS - Western Digital CAVIAR SE16 640GB 16MB SATA/300 7200RPM (WD6400AAKS)
which is just under £50 but with less cache.
 
Thanks for the reply. When you say:

"640GB guarantees that it uses 2 333GB platters, which is much higher aerial density than 500GB HDD which uses 2 platters of 250GB. This means that 640GB HDD has sighnificant performance advantage in terms of transfer speed."

How significant would this difference be? I dont really need the extra 140GB and with postage it would come to about £67 which is alot over what i would like to spend.

The second HD you listed has 16mb cache what difference would that make compared to 32mb cache?
 
The speed/performance difference between the cache sizes is pretty much neglible, and definitely not worth a large price jump.

The platter size, however, will definitely be a noticable difference in speed. This is because both drives are spinning at the same speed (7200rpm) and this means that the drive with the bigger platter can read a lot more data in the same amount of time.
 
Thanks for the advice, i've just bought the WD drive (cheaper one) suggested above. My Maxtor 250GB has just broken, so i'm sending that back for a replacment.

I was planning on partitioning the WD 640GB to keep Windows and other programs seperate. Then put a backup image of a clean system on the Maxtor when it comes back.

Would partitioning the 640GB affect the performance at all?
 

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