Samsung was a big player in this arena once and that explains the 20% response on a brand that doesn't enjoy anything close to the market presence it did five years ago. Hitachi on the other hand, has kept a silent profile with a limited range of products. The new surge in laptop hard drives has seen brands like WD and Hitachi sprinting with a new range of laptop drives.We spoke to Arvind from Ludhiana who recently purchased a 500GB laptop hard drive to build his custom portable storage solution. "It was cheaper for me to buy a 500GB 2.5-inch drive with a good casing. Not only did I save money, but I got five years' warranty, which otherwise was impossible with most portable hard drives that come with one year warranty," he said.

Desktop Processors

Intel has been the choice of the masses for a long time, but it now seems to have found a foothold in the enthusiasts' segment as well. Almost 30% of the Intel respondents owned the latest high performance processors that were launched not more than eight months back. There is a clear trend on upgrade cycles going shorter with buyers wanting to upgrade to newer, faster and energy-efficient chips. The average money spent on processors has not changed much though: it ranges between, Rs. 3,500 and Rs. 5,000. AMD still holds the value card with about 90% of the users being happy with the cost-benefit ratio they get from AMD. Most of the AMD users were on a budget or midrange products and less than 5% of the users owned a higher-end AMD quad core Phenom or even a triple core Phenom processor.Intel scored a home run over AMD in the performance department but AMD was quick to bounce back with equal scores on support and reliability.

Performance is still the single most important factor for processor buyers with very few actually being worried about the performance-per-watt trend. Akhil had a very strong opinion on the power consumption wars between AMD and Intel. "The extra 20W of power consumption will not cause any concern to my PSU, but a hit in performance or heating issues will surely spoil the party. I would go for the best performing CPU for my budget without worrying about power consumption or approach. Who cares how AMD or Intel achieve their quad core chips, as long as they perform better? native or non-native makes no difference to me!" he says.

Multi-core awareness