X-bitlabs reviews 30 250GB hard drives including:
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250
Hitachi Deskstar 7K250
Maxtor Maxling Plus II
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9
Maxtor Maxline III
Maxtor DiamondMax 10
Samsung Spinpoint P120S
Samsung SpinPoint P120
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8
Western Digital Caviar RE
Western Digital Caviar SE
Western Digital Caviar SE16
HDDs with a storage capacity of 250 gigabytes currently have the most optimal price/performance ratio. Among the thirty 250GB products included into this roundup we have only published the results of the three HDDs from Hitachi before. So, our new testbed has a new SATA/PATA controller, and today we can offer you the test results of all 30 HDDs tested on it.
One year is just a moment for a centuries-old oak tree and a long enough time for a man, but about half a lifecycle for a modern hard disk. Driven by tough competition, the manufacturers have made a point of updating their product lines at least once each six months. The production time of each particular modification is getting shorter, and writing HDD reviews is quite a tricky task. Just when you get enough products to perform a comparative test, there appears a new one that should be reviewed as well. And if you put the review away for a while to perform some other tests, you often return to it to find that it is too late: most of the products are already out of production, replaced with more advanced ones, and are leaving the shops rapidly. That was what happened to our review of 250GB hard disk drives we wanted to publish last summer. There are reasons why this article wasn’t completed then...
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