All-arounders At A Reasonable Price
Hitachi DeskStar T7K500, 320 GB
The Deskstar T7K500 ranks higher than the 7K160, which available capacities ranging between 250 and 500 GB; it therefore addresses the premium market.
With its 75 MB/s transfer rate, the 320 GB model is indeed fast, but easily defeated by Western Digital's Caviar SE 160 GB and Samsung's new SpinPoint T166. With a spectacular price starting at $105 for Hitachi's 320 GB drive, though, you get a lot of storage space. If you can do without the very last grain of performance, you'll get a pretty large hard drive with 8 MB cache and 7,200 RPM at a relatively small price.
