Western Digital is in the middle of launching a new series of drives at the moment, so it was only able to send us two samples for this Labs test. The two drives in question are this 500GB drive and the 320GB Caviar SE WD3200AAJS. The new drives differentiate from the old models by the addition of AA at the end of their product code. It's crucial that you make sure you buy one of the new drives; as they use 160-166GB platters instead of 100GB platters, they perform much better than their predecessors. Aside from capacity, the only difference between the new SE and SE16 drives is the buffer size - the SE drives have 8MB buffers, and the SE16 drives a 16MB buffer.

The 500GB of storage that the Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS provides is split across three platters, each spinning at 7,200rpm. The SE16 WD5000AAKS was very fast in our Paint Shop Pro test, achieving a score of 1.53, which was matched only by the Samsung SpinPoint T166 HD501LJ. However, the Western Digital drive is slower at loading games, taking 41 seconds to load Far Cry. The SE16 WD5000AAKS is cheap, as each gigabyte costs just 18p, less than most other 500GB drives. However, it isn't able to take on the Samsung SpinPoint T166 HD501LJ.

• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008

• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards
• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs