Of the four drives which are on the market, we feel that Western Digital's Caviar SE16 has the best mix of price / performance / features at this time. The SE16 provided the highest sustained transfer rates of any 7,200 RPM hard drive we've tested to date (breaking 60 MB/s in a single-drive scenario), but also provided excellent overall write speeds and seek times, while consuming very tolerable power levels and maintaining low noise levels. If WD would expand their warranty to five years to compete with Seagate, it would be no contest.

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9 would be our second choice, as our numbers looked pretty good overall, but Seagate's drives come with an excellent five year warranty, and also ran noticeably cooler throughout our intensive testing. For workstation users who care about reliably over raw performance, we still would give the nod to Seagate, as their 7200.8 and 7200.9 families have been extremely stable over time.

Hitachi's Deskstar 7K500 drive maintained solid performance throughout our tests, and still manages to hold up quite well against these newer 500 GB entries. Despite its use of lower density platters, the 7K500 is not drastically different in terms of power consumption, heat, or noise, but it does have slightly increased levels in these areas. While it wouldn't be our first choice, given that there are better options out there, if there was a good deal on the 7K500 drives, it would be foolish to pass them up, as they're still excellent drives.

As for Maxtor's Diamondmax 11, I don't quite know what to say. I tested multiple DiamondMax 11 500 GB drives, and all of them gave me terrible, awful benchmark results, despite changing every test variable to try to see if there was a source for its terrible performance. Maxtor's technical support was more or less useless in helping resolve my issues, so I'm left with a big question mark over my head. The drive performed well in HDTach disk read tests, but if it can't put up solid numbers on the Intel ICH7, one of the most solid (and high-performance) SATA-II/300 controllers on the market, there must be something really wrong with this lineup. If Maxtor gets in contact with us and provides an explanation or a fix, we will update our scores. Until that time, we can't recommend the DiamondMax 11 just yet.