Labs

Western Digital's WD5000YS is marketed for use in multiple-disk Raid arrays, and the company even went as far as to send us two so we could try them out in this context. Even if you only want a single disk for a Mac Pro or G5, though, it's clearly the best one to buy.

The Raid Edition produced the best overall performance in our set of disk benchmarks. It was beaten by the Seagate and Samsung models in our sequential write test, and it was only just behind Seagate's Barracuda in the sequential read test. Where the Seagate disk began to struggle in our random access tests, though, the WD5000YS started to shine. It produced the best speeds in our random read and random write tests, always edging just ahead of the Caviar and Samsung's HD501LJ.

The Raid Edition costs £122, putting it in direct competition with Samsung's HD501LJ. It costs 24p per gigabyte, making it one of the three best value disks here. Western Digital's own Caviar and Samsung's HD501LJ are both impressive alternatives, but this is clearly the best internal disk: it's fast, good value and will give you lots of room.