Hard disk drives are quickly and constantly growing up in capacities. Of course, every one of us would be glad to be presented a large HDD as a gift, but when it comes to purchasing one for your own money, there are other factors to consider. Some users just don’t need huge system disks as they store all their data on external media or dedicated servers (this is especially true for corporate users). Others have nothing to fill a large disk with. Therefore, such users often prefer 500-gigabyte hard disks which can offer a very high performance as they are based on highest-density platters available today. Having only one or two platters inside, such HDDs are also generally cold. Their larger-capacity cousins provide some notion about their performance but we will have a few surprises in this review.As a matter of fact, we’ve got lots of data on 500GB HDDs because there have been as many as four generations of such disks, counting by the recording density per platter. We were tempted to compile a monumental comparative report but it would be too hard to read. So, we had to limit ourselves to 12 modern models which are available in shops today.