Western Digital's Caviar AV range is aimed at consumer electronics applications. The drives are specified with a longer MTBF than most drives - 1,000,000 hours as opposed to 600,000-750,000. It's also quiet, emitting just 28dBA even when seeking. The drive is based around a trio of platters, each with just 167GB apiece, which is far less than the other three 500GB drives.

Not surprisingly, considering its lowly areal density, the Caviar AV didn't make it to the top in our HD Tach 3 RW synthetic tests. Its read rate of 71.3MB/sec and write rate of 68.3MB/sec would have been competitive a few years ago, but the latest drives can read and write a good 10-20MB/sec faster. The 13.5ms average access time is quite respectable, although it's still nothing to get excited about.

However, despite the modest specifications and synthetic performance numbers, the Caviar AV's Gimp image editing score was joint second with the phenomenally quick 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1, which has double the areal density of the Caviar AV. It was also surprisingly quick at loading the Relic level into Crysis.

The Caviar AV is the fastest 500GB drive in this Labs test, and its £67.37 price tag works out at 14p per gigabyte, making it great value for money.

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