Storage space is the new blue LED, everybody wants as much of it as they can get. I swear that in the next five years we'll all look back on this day and think, “WTF were we doing with spinning media? We were totally crazy!” Until then, though, conventional hard drives will get bigger and bigger, so people can have a place to put all of their prized data. From music to movies to pictures to books, people keep their lives on their hard drives lately and thus need lots of room to store it all.

With drives as large as 1TB (that's a terabyte, you know… 1024GB) available in mainstream technology, the once considered monstrous 500 giggers now seem like pocket change and are the budget user's choice buy. Today we're going to have a look at Western Digital's 500GB Caviar SE16 (WD5000AAKS) drive, one of the most popular drive for system builders lately. Specifications, borrowed from WD's website, are as follows:


Continue on as we take a look at the drive itself.