Massive Amount of Storage But Harder to Set Up on Older Computers
Written: Dec 27 '03 (Updated Dec 27 '03)
Product Rating:
Pros: Fast performance, included Ultra ATA/100 controller card, lots of storage at a very reasonable price
Cons: Pain to install on older computers, floppy-based drivers, using controller card disable drive activity light
The Bottom Line: You can't go wrong with Western Digital drives: they are fast, quiet, and are a good value. Large drives (>137GB) are difficult to install on old hardware though!
esasaki's Full Review: Western Digital Caviar® Special Edition WD200...
I have a two-year old Dell Dimension computer that was running out of hard disk space (60GB seemed a lot at the time!) so I decided to upgrade to a new Western Digital 200GB Special Edition 7200RPM Hard Drive.
The drive comes boxed in plastic blister packaging and includes the drive, 40-pin IDE cable, driver diskettes, installation guide, and an Ultra ATA/100 PCI controller card. This card, billed as a $50 value, is necessary if you have a system that does support hard drives over 137 GB.
The drive itself, in addition to running at a fast 7200 RPM, it includes an 8MB buffer that caches frequently access information rather than having to read it from the disc. Most older hard drives ran at 5400 RPM and only had a 2MB buffer. At best, the drive will transfer 100 MB/s using Ultra ATA/100, with an average read seek time of 8.9 ms and an average write seek time of 10.9 ms. In short, it's a very high performance EIDE drive.
I've heard reports that retail boxed WDC drives (with product numbers ending in "RTL") only have a 1-year limited warranty from the date of manufacture. However, the WD2000JBRTL drive has a 3-year warranty from the date of purchase listed in the packaging. You might be able to see which warranty you have prior to purchase by looking into the clear plastic packaging and reading the text at the bottom (it's the first line, in bold).
I'm pretty handy with computer upgrades, and opening up the case, installing cards or drives, and so forth isn't intimidating in the least. And I'm comfortable setting jumpers and configuring BIOS settings to install additional drives--or so I thought. The packaging says the drive is "Easy to Install" and advertises two steps (installing the hardware then the software). However, one look at the fold-out, map-like installation guide suggests that you're in for a bit of a challenge if you don't have a nearly new computer.
There are three "barriers," or operating and BIOS limitations that the documentation cautions about. One has to do with the Windows operating systems generally not being able to support hard disks larger than 137 GB. The second is the "32 GB Barrier" in which computers as late as June 1999 may not support hard drives larger than 32 GB. Finally, even older computers may not support disks larger than 8.4GB.
The workaround for these three barriers are to install the supplied controller card, connect your hard drives to it, and install the proper software drivers, or upgrade the computer's BIOS on older PC's.
Rather than go into detail about what it took to finally get my Dell to use this new hard drive, here's what I did in a nutshell:
- Installed controller card. For some reason, Windows XP did not auto-detect the new hardware, so I had to manually add the card using the Add New Hardware wizard.
- Had problem with my floppy drive so I had to download drivers from the card manufacturer (Promise).
- Tried to put the new drive on the new controller and leave the existing boot drive on the Dell's built-in controller. System wouldn't boot.
- Moved both drives to the new controller. System would boot, but BIOS didn't like that it didn't see any hard drives attached to the built-in controller. Had to disable both primary and secondary hard drives in system BIOS.
- Windows XP would now boot, but couldn't load the Western Digital "Data Lifeguard" tools from floppy (since my drive is not working). These tools are designed to partition and format the drive and install drivers to overcome the previously mentioned size limitations.
- Downloaded and installed the latest Data Lifeguard tools for Windows (version 11). Program wouldn't run on Windows XP...I would launch the program and nothing would happen.
- Searched on the Western Digital support knowledgebase and found that you can run "diskmgmt.msc" on Windows 2000 and XP computers to use the built-in Windows disk management tool. Used that to partition and format the new drive.
- Formatting the 200 GB drive took a long time, at least 3 hours.
So, long story short, it took the better part of an entire evening to get this new drive up and running. Further, since the hard drives are not using the built-in EIDE controller, the disk activity light on the case doesn't show when the disk is in use anymore. I'm also surprised that WDC shipped a drive manufactured in mid-2003 with floppies instead of a CD. Many new computers don't have floppy drives, and I'm not willing to buy a new floppy drive now as I am to buy a new VCR. And I have no idea why Data Lifeguard software for Windows won't run.
With that said, I'm completely happy with the new drive now that it's installed. It's almost silent, noticeably faster than my existing drive (an IBM Deskstor), and has more free space than I know what to do with--for now. And the price was right...a little under 50 cents per GB. I paid more than that a decade ago per MB.
I'm pretty sure that the newer the computer you have, the easier it will be to install this 200 GB drive. Still, for everyone other than those who are really comfortable opening up PC cases, downloading drivers from the Internet, and formatting and partitioning hard drives, you're probably better off getting an external USB 2.0 or Firewire drive or paying a professional to install a new one.
This award-winning hard drives offer the performance, capacity and reliability necessary for todays highly demanding applications in PCs and Macintosh...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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