We had to make an important point back in December, when we received Samsung's T133 series and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, because both fell short of our performance expectations. On the one hand, hard drive makers offer products with capacities of up to 500 GB today, and these offer enough capacity for the requirements of most home and small business applications. On the other hand, it seems that these capacities are achieved by trading off additional performance gains (Samsung) or even by tolerating a performance decline (Seagate).

In fact, hard drives are the only component that noticeably slows down your everyday work with your computer. Whether you start or shutdown your system, open large project files or applications or have the system load level data in 3D games, it is always the hard drive you are waiting for. Obviously, changing the operating system will help as little as criticizing the hard drive companies would. From a technology point of view, the hard drive makers are squeezing out as much performance as possible while maintaining data safety.

On the basis of our experience we recommend using two hard drives if you are at least a bit performance conscious. In order to maximize data safety and performance, you should use the fastest hard drive that you can get for your operating system and temporary data, and store all regular data such as images, music, project data, video files etc. onto a larger hard drive. This one does not necessarily have to be that fast, because access happens only occasionally.