Western Digital is making some great small-capacity drives these days, and hitting a good blend of value and performance. The 320GB Caviar SE16 is a case in point. Our testing started off promisingly with the HD Tach 3 RW results. The average sustained reading rate of 92.4MB/sec is one of the best this month, as was the writing rate of 83.7MB/sec, although the access time of 16.4ms isn't among the best.

The Caviar SE16 performed very well in our Gimp image editing test. It was the fastest 320GB drive, and the fourth equal fastest overall. However, the situation was reversed in our Crysis level loading test. Not only was the Caviar SE16 the slowest 320GB disk this month, it was the sixth equal slowest overall, although it was nearly 10 seconds faster than the slowest drives.

The Caviar SE16 offers mixed performance. While it's great for everyday applications, it isn't quite so good for gaming. However, it's also one of the cheapest 320GB models, which makes it very appealing. Costing just 17p per gigabyte, this is a great value drive. There are better-value alternatives in the larger capacity categories, but if your budget won't stretch to these, then the 320GB Caviar SE16 is worth considering.

• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008

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