The chaps over at TechSpot take a look at two of the largest desktop drives on the market - the Caviar SE 4000KD which is a 400GB 4-platter SATA-II behemoth, and from Seagate, the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB 4-platter SATA-II drive.

These drives, while not spectacular, are nothing to be disappointed by. The relative speeds of these disks put them on par with other drives of their size. Despite having a 4 platter design, the large amount of data available puts their performance levels (initially) well above a small desktop HD, making disks like these a fairly good fit for both an OS and a data drive.

I was very surprised to see that the performance difference between the two was very slight. Despite having a 25% difference in capacity and a 33% difference in data density, the WD drive managed to shoe in on some areas and matched the Seagate drive very well. Raw performance did put the Seagate drive on top, and the 500GB size is hard to beat, with only a very few models on the market offering that. Once 3-platter designs for 500GB become more readily available, we'll probably see revisions of these models with higher densities..

Although you will still have to pay a premium for drives these large, they are not a bad deal either at ~$185 for Western Digital's 400GB drive, and ~$290 for Seagate's. Come to think about it and we used to pay a similar amount of money for a hundred gig disks just a few years ago.