"I NEED MORE space on my ~ hard-disk." How ~ many times have you said this to yourself? It's true no amount of storage is "enough" and if you bought yourself a 160GB hard drive six months ago, chances are you are eyeing a 320GB drive now (especially with the fall in costs). We compare three 320GB SATA II desktop drives to help you decide on your next upgrade. The drives come with the latest features like PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), NCQ support and 3Gbps support.

We ran these drives through a combination of synthetic and real-world tests to get a complete picture of performance as seen in a desktop environment. We used HD Tune's random read and write tests. These gauge speeds seen throughout a drive's surface, including the time taken to access given data. We also ran Everest Ultimate's linear read, linear write and read test suite modules. These are low-level tests and indicate the drive's performance while carrying out a single read or write operation. Managing multiple read-write tasks simultaneously gets much harder for the drives.

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This is an indicator of real-world performance where a drive might read OS files, write to its pagefile, and load applications, simultaneously. For this test, we created batch files to automate file transfer from one partition of the test drive to another, along with two other similar oper¬ations running alongside. The ambient thermal behav¬ior was measured with a Fluke multi-meter and noise levels were also considered. None ofthe drives were audible once inside the case and hence we didn't use this as a factor in the comparison test.