Hitachi GST Deskstar E7K500 HDS725050KLA360 (0A31619) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: The drive is very fast and quiet - once you enable AAM, seeks are barely noticeable and the spindle is whisper-quiet. Reliability is good, with the noteable feature of offloading the heads to a ramp (some other drives use a contact start/stop). Supports 3 modes of power management, including slowing of the spindle.

Cons: This drive contains 5 platters and 10 heads, which leads to idle power consumption of 9W. With AAM disabled, it can consume up to 14W (11W with AAM). I needed to install the drive in a fanless enclosure and it reached 55C in all the enclosures I tried. It should be fine in cases with some airflow.

Pros: Quiet drive, runs at cool temperatures. Feature Tool from Hitachi's website lets you configure many features of this drive.

Cons: Platters take a long time to spin up to their full speed (about 10 sec or so). But this isnt an issue unless you power-on/power-off your system and/or drive often.

Overall Review: After installing this drive, my motherboard detects it with no issues at all. I downloaded the feature tool from Hitachi's website to change it from SATA150 to SATA300. You can download the tool either as a bootable floppy or as a bootable CD image. This drive was very quiet at its default acoustic configuration (best performance/loudest operation). I used the feature tool to change the acoustic level to the quietest setting, and now I done hear any noise from the drive at all! I use this drive mostly for recording TV shows.

Pros: Very nice design, fast and plenty of cache (16MB), Good 3 year warranty and quiet operation (provided you enable the acoustic settings)

Cons: Comes factory pre-set to SATA150 and not SATA300 and requires a pain in the a.. re-configuration using a bootable CD or floppy image from Hitachi's website. It should have a darn jumper!

Overall Review: Have been running 6 of them in RAID 6 for almost a year and they are working like a charm with no errors or failures.

Pros: Great drive, large capacity, cheap. Newegg had the best price around - I won't shop anywhere else!

Cons: A tiny tiny bit loud, but certainly not loud enough to knock an egg off...I suppose most drives like this are a little louder.

Overall Review: I put this drive in the antec mx-1 external case, and runs perfect. But remember to go into disk management and format the drive before you think it's DOA. I thought it was, but after calling Hitachi (who by the way were very helpful and quick), I had it formatted and up and running in no time.

Pros: Best HD investment I have made in some time. I needed to add additional storage to my editing system so I purchased 2 of this model. Easy install for SATA I and with a little effort SATA II is within sight.

Cons: None so far...

Overall Review: I plan on purchasing more as the need arises.

Pros: Excellent drive, slightly thinner profile than most disk drives. For the most part, a pretty quite drive. No jumpers required and preset to 1.5Gb/s for those still on SATA 1.5Gb/s boards.

Cons: Slightly more expensive drive than others in it's size,categories, and specification.

Overall Review: Be prepared for a long format time.

Pros: I used 5 of these in my Thecus N5200 and they are AMAZING. they are very quiet. I would recomemend these to everyone who is looking for a great drive at a good price.

Cons: Absolutley None

Pros: With the newer 16MB cache, I find this drive hard to beat for high-density data applications in RAID 0, 0+1, and 1. Started with Hitachi Global Storage drives years ago (IBM) and thought that they broke the 500GB price barrier 18 months ago when I put (10) of them into operation. No problems then, and fewer now. The total cost of ownership reference attempts to take into account DOA's, early failures, and burnouts. I have experienced none of these and would highly recommend these to really "pack it in" at about $0.37/GB, at least until a reliable 750GB can drop below $0.40/GB

Cons: None, really. If you require ultra-fast for DVI or CAE, it's still hard to beat the sustained output from U320 SCSI or FC, but this comes very close.

Overall Review: If you require ultra-fast for DVI or CAE, it's still hard to beat the sustained output from U320 SCSI or FC, but this comes very close.