WD Caviar Blue 500GB SATA3 Full Specifications

With applications, operating systems and games pushing the boundaries in terms of disk space the average size of a hard disk drive has risen to between 500GB - 1TB. Prices for anything below 500GB are the same as above 500GB so it makes sense to go for the bigger drive. Upon investigation, the price of a SATA2 drive compared to SATA3 was exactly the same. Our ASRock H67M-GE has 2 x SATA3 ports so it would be advantageous to go with the faster SATA3 drive since this delivers 6GB/s rather than 3GB/s on the SATA2. So we chose to go with the Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA3 drive which operates at 7200RPM with 16MB Cache.

Investing in a new Sandy Bridge build brings with it newer technologies and whilst the pricing is good its worthwhile moving to the likes of SATA3 since the traditional HDD is will remain dominant throughout the year and beyond, even though SSDs are dropping in price.





Samsung SH-S223C

Moving onto the optical drives, taking a look at OcUK's product listings the SH-S223C appears to be one of the best value drives currently available. We went with 2 drives since its always useful to include an additional in order to copy from disc to disc.

The SH-S223C is a 22x DVD ReWriter that has the SATA inferface so will offer slightly better performance over IDE which has almost been phased out now. At such an amazing price, I really don't know how OcUK can do it!