digitaldoc's Full Review: Western Digital Caviar® Special Edition WD160...
Introduction
The Western Digital 160 gigabyte hard drive represents one of the best values in an IDE interface drive today. It's large size, quiet mechanism, fast data acquisition and solid reputation for reliability make it a first choice for a moderately priced new system build. This drive was purchased for a new Shuttle small form factor pc (SN41G2) to be reviewed separately on epinions at
"http://www.epinions.com/content_138039561860" While I have also owned hard drives from Maxtor, Seagate, and Quantum, I believe that Western Digital is the best in general. I still use a 1 GB hard drive from WD that is from 1994 in another system!
I bought this at Microcenter with a $70 rebate that I received, so it cost me about $75 total; this is less than $.50 per megabyte. Look for these "loss leader" deals to get you into the store, you can get some quality hardware if you wait around for a great deal. This is a bargain as a few years ago $2 to $3 per megabyte was the norm.
Key Features
This drive's platter rotates at the 7200 rpm speed; some hard drives are only 5400, or 4200 in some notebooks. In a recent PC Magazine article, the 7200 drives were 9% faster than their 5400 counterparts on general office based computing benchmarks. While some specialty drives rotate at 10,000 rpm, they are a lot more money, and need special interfaces like SATA or SCSI. So 7200 is the faster speed in general use and adequate for most tasks (except for specialty video editing).
The drive uses the ubiquitous IDE interface (also known as ATAPI) that every computer motherboard uses. It uses the faster 100 iteration, but is backward compatible to the previous versions.
The cache is the 8 MB variety. Two megabytes is the standard amount in most drives. What this does is the drive tries to access data ahead of what you need. By keeping the data in cache instead of on the platter it can access it faster and more smoothly. In general, more cache makes for a faster drive. There is no downside except for added cost, in general. In many computer reviews, a faster computer is attributed to the extra cache of the hard drive when comparing systems with the same processor, and equivalent motherboards.
Installation
The drive comes with a setup poster, a cd-rom of setup tools, and the actual drive. An IDE cable and screws to secure the drive are also included. Compared to other drives, the jumper settings are more critical on this drive and WD in general. If the drive is the only device on an IDE circuit, then the jumper should be removed. This could easily confuse some novices. The installation otherwise is the standard IDE cable and power supply installation. The supplied screws easily attached it to the rails of a 3 1/2 inch drive bay.
The included disc of tools was basic at best. They prompted me to format the drive at 137 gb because only Win XP with service pack 1 supports drives larger than that size. There is no "bios overlay" software on the disc as suggested in the documentation. The recommended solution from their website was to purchase an add on IDE interface card, or format at only 137 gb. Neither was acceptable for the system, and it seemed a waste to lose 23 gb. The solution I found on a usenet group was to partition the hard drive into 2 parts, each 80 gb. This way I avoid the 137 gb issue. After partitioning, in "My Computer" I had a C drive, and a D drive, each with 75 gb of storage space (losing 5 gb each to formatting). The advantage is that the data I keep on D will not be lost if I have to reformat C to reload the Windows XP operating system. This all proceeded very well, however the included disc tools could not do any of this. The DOS tools on a Windows Boot Disk did this well, look for a guide in Google if you're not very comfortable in a DOS environment.
Benchmarking
I obtained some benchmark data using a program called HD Tach. I ran it several times, the following numbers were typical, and reproducible.
HD Tach version 2.70
Read speed maximum 28.8 MB/sec
Minimum 27.4 MB/sec
Average 28.0 MB/sec
Random access time 12.8 milliseconds
CPU utilization 35.1%
Unfortunately, at this time I have nothing to compare this to, so I don't know how this compares to other drives. However, it seems that it could supply data at a more than adequate rate to other system components, such as a cd-rw drive.
I have not had any heat issues with this drive, even with it installed in a small form factor pc.
Warranty
Unfortunately, the warranty is only for a year. These things used to be for 3 years, now they try to sell it as an extended warranty. Reportedly, Samsung still includes a 3 year warranty as well as some others. If this is important to you, look elsewhere. Of course, a warranty does not protect you from the catastrophe of a hard drive failure with loss of data. At a formatted 150 gb, it's not going to be easy to back this entire drive up. I routinely send important data over my LAN to another computer hard drive, or I use my external hard drive, also from Western Digital "http://www.epinions.com/content_136182337156".
In Summary
The drive is great value as an individual computer component. Its spacious capacity complements its smooth quiet operation. Even when formatted, 150 gb is more than large enough to accommodate all but the largest music and digital photo collections.
However, there are some downsides to a novice. The included software tools are not up to the same level of usefulness that Maxtor bundles. The jumper settings are picky. Finally, the short warranty does not sweeten the deal any.
I would recommend this drive to an experienced system builder of a general value system, or to upgrade an existing system either as an additional drive, or a replacement drive. A true novice should shop elsewhere for better software and support. Also, if an equivalent drive offers a longer warranty, I might be tempted to purchase it instead.
The drive itself, I would award 5 stars to, however, the warranty and other tools are barely 3 stars, thus the overall 4 star rating. For the price I paid, I'm very satisfied; if I paid full price I'm not sure I would be.
WD Caviar Special Edition hard drive is designed to maximize desktop computer performance for activities requiring high-performance storage such as co...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Ships in Certified Frustration-Free Packaging Brand Name: Western Digital Model: WD1600JB Hard Disk Size: 160 GB Warranty: 3 years warrantyMore at Amazon Marketplace
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