Now that the prices of SSDs have dropped to well below 50 cents per GB, we expect that only few Hardware.Info readers will still want to use a conventional hard drive as their primary storage device. We still can't quite live without them, however, because with prices of around 5 cents per GB, hard drives still remain a much cheaper way of storing large amounts of data.

Hard drives haven't seen all that much innovation during the last few years; manufacturers are primarily focusing on increasing the capacity of their products by increasing the data density of the magnetic disks (the so-called platters) found within the drives. At the time of writing, the largest platters that Western Digital and their subsidiary HGST use for their 3.5? drives have a capacity of 1200 GB each. Through combining five such platters in a 3.5? enclosure, they are capable of manufacturing drives with a storage capacity of 6 TB, the second largest drives featured in this round-up. Competitor Toshiba currently uses platters with a maximum capacity of 1000 GB. The platters with the largest capacity can be found in the Seagate Archive HDD 8TB: due to the use of a new technology, Seagate managed to cram 1333 GB on a single platter. More on this later.