The Western Digital WD5000HHTZ 500GB is a hard disk drive, which means it stores data using quickly rotating disks, or platters, that can be read and written on via the moving actuator arm. Hard disk drives generally have a large storage capacity, and so are perfect for large amounts of data. The potential performance is well below that of solid-state drives, but they can definitely still hold their own. The Western Digital WD5000HHTZ 500GB in particular is a top of the range hard disk drive so should be more than enough to complete a PC build as a primary storage device.

With a cache of 64MB, the Western Digital WD5000HHTZ 500GB can store an extremely large amount of data temporarily, which will result in much faster loading times for previously loaded files and applications. At a speed of 10000 RPM, the hard disk drive spins at among the fastest speed available on the hard disk drive market, which is a good indicator of its high performance and low latency. Its speed may be louder than desired, and if the platters are poorly designed the high speed could have long-term reliability repercussions, however.

With a capacity of 500GB, the Western Digital WD5000HHTZ 500GB has a fairly small amount of storage for an hard disk drive. Using the SATA 3.0 6Gb/s interface this hard disk drive will never be limited by its connection with the motherboard. In fact, mechanical hard disk drives cannot even reach the bandwidth capacity allowed by SATA 2.0 3Gb/s, so it would not matter even if it were plugged into a SATA 2.0 motherboard slot.

A form factor size of 3.5" is standard for desktop drives, and this will fit into any standard case drive bay, or into a 5.25" drive bay with an adapter.