Many people forget the high impact that hard drive performance has on the speed of the whole system. Especially starting programs or booting Windows can take painfully long if your hard drive performance is low. Often the subjective 'feel' of a system's performance is significantly depending on the hard drive used. We can add as much memory to our systems as we want. As long as we are using any kind of Windows OS, we will always have to live with those swap file issues. Maybe sometime I will understand why.

Hard drive storage space as well as speed have increased immensely in the last six years. Yet, the prices have fallen too. Not every hard drive maker survived this process. Maxtor, IBM, Seagate and Western Digital are the survivors. Connor drives or Quantum disks are only history.

The readers' choice for the best hard drive was the closest call of the six categories. The winner, Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 60 , won by a mere 287 votes or 0.54% over Western Digital's WD1000 with 8MB cache. The third, Seagate's Barracuda 180 SCSI drive, isn't far behind as well. Basically, three of the four remaining hard drive makers are in the top three and they are almost held in the same esteem.

Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 60 is a 7200 RPM ATA100 disk with solid performance and an attractive price.

We congratulate Maxtor for winning the Tom's Hardware Guide Readers' Choice Award for 'Best High End Hard Disk'!