Western Digital 200GB SE hard drive with 8MB of cache is a great performer.
Written: Jul 08 '04 (Updated Jul 08 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Speedy data transfer at a good price.
Cons: Others have reported poor reliability; always have a backup!
The Bottom Line: The bottom line likes the price of this great performing drive.
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| ivplay's Full Review: Western Digital WD Caviar SE 200GB 7200 / 8MB / 8.... |
Have you ever found a deal on something that you knew you didn’t need, but it was such a good deal, you bought it anyway? That would be how I came to own this hard drive. You see, TigerDirect.com has an email list that you can opt into that will send you an updated email every so often with discounted and highly rebated items for your perusal. Most of these types of solicitations really do not catch my eye, but this one sure did. TigerDirect.com had the 200GB Western Digital hard drive with 8 MB of cache (Special Edition) on sale for $89.99 after rebates. That is a lot of storage capacity for $0.51/GB ($12 shipping charge added on)! I figured that I could upgrade my system disk which was currently a 120 GB Seagate, wipe the Seagate and then sell it in a system or at online auction. This is how I have come to own this hard drive…
Western Digital Offerings
I have mentioned this before in a review of a Western Digital 160GB hard drive on Epinions, but it bears repeating here. Western Digital sells three main lines of IDE drives, the Protégé(value drives), Caviar(mainstream IDE), and Caviar SE(High Performance IDE).
The Protégé line comes in capacities of 20GB to 160GB and turn at a rotational speed of 5400 RPM with a 2MB buffer. The Caviar line comes in capacities of 20GB to 250GB, turns at 7200 RPM, and also has a 2MB buffer. The Caviar SE line ships in capacities of 40GB to 250GB and turn at 7200RPM, but they come complete with an 8MB buffer.
The particular drive I have purchased is in the Caviar SE line and therefore has a model number of WD2000JB. It was not the retail boxed version, so therefore there was no RTL appended to the end of the part number. As the area this review is posted under contains a WD2000JB x, it is for either the retail version or the OEM version.
Specifications
As stated above, the drive ships with 200GB of capacity and spins at 7200 revolutions per minute. The reported read seek time associated with this drive is 8.9ms average while the write seek time is 10.9ms. These ratings are similar in speed to Maxtor’s drives, yet slightly slower than the timings achieved by Seagate drives.
Other than the seek times, it is important to note MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failures. This is the failure rate associated with the drive, which is given in terms of contact times. Western Digital claims that this drive will operate a minimum of 50,000 contact start/stop cycles, which means that you should be able to access the drive at least 50,000 times prior to failure due to misaligned heads, etc. This is similar to Maxtor and Seagate, although I do feel that Seagate is a more reliable manufacturer.
Finally, sound generation is an important issue for many users, especially those building a computer for Home Theater PC use. The Western Digital drive has reported sound generation of 35-37 dB while the Seagate’s come in at 25 dB.
General Considerations for hard drive purchases
While this section is not specific to this drive, it may be important to you if this is your first after market hard drive install. Three items to consider are cache size, data transfer speed and the 137GB limitation.
Cache Size
As you may have noted, I specifically called out the fact that the cache size for this hard drive is 8MB. This is four times the typical cache size of 2MB, but it begs the question of whether or not it is any better. Cache is ultimately a storage space for data which about to be sent to the processor or stored on the drive, and it acts to smooth out the transfers by reducing/eliminating stalling while a fetch for more is performed. In prior testing between a Seagate 120GB drive with 2 MB cache and a WD 80GB drive with 8 MB of cache I had noticed no difference in speeds. This drive, however, appears to take some performance gains with the larger cache, as you will see later.
RPM
Faster is better, right? Most testing on the net says that this is not the case. A 7200 RPM drive transfers data no faster or minimally faster than a 5400 RPM drive in most cases. That is due to the fact that often the limiting factor is the cabling and ATA parameters rather than the drive spindle speed. Some would say that the higher the RPM’s the faster the drive will fail, but based on published MTBF rates this appears to be a non-issue. In my own admittedly amateur testing, the biggest factor in data transfer is not the RPM of the disk, but rather the ATA specification of the board, drive and cabling. If you have all three capable of ATA 133 speeds (133MB/s), you will see faster data transfer than with ATA 100. To be honest, though, most users will never be able to tell the difference in real-world usage. For that reason, buy whatever is the best price for you; don’t pay extra for a specification that may or may not make any difference in your daily life.
137GB limitation
This drive is over 137GB, and therefore will require some newer equipment and OS’s. In fact, to realize the full potential of the drive, it may require you to buy an ATA controller card if your system does not meet the requirements. If your motherboard is older and cannot flash the BIOS, you will probably need a PCI ATA controller card. Even if your motherboard is newer and can flash the BIOS (or already supports larger drives), you need to be running a newer version of Windows 2000 or XP with service packs to identify over 137GB of hard drive space. With Windows 98SE or prior, you need a controller card. Sorry!
Without getting too technical, the older OS’s and motherboards used an old 28-bit addressing system that had a limitation of 137GB addressing capability. The newer OS’s and BIOS raise this to 48-bit addressing capability, thus increasing the ceiling to 144 Petabytes. That is one huge amount of bytes!
I recently ran into this issue while upgrading a computer for a family member. I had to update the BIOS, but in this case it was simply to install a hard drive larger than 8 GB! (40GB) This particular computer runs Windows 98 and the BIOS was not set to deal with the higher addressing capability. It was not an easy task, but the newer boards have made flashing the BIOS a much simpler task.
Installation/Use
I installed this in my system as a slave and proceeded to image my existing, smaller hard drive over to this one using PowerQuest Drive Image 7. (I will review this software package at some point in the future) From there I simply disconnected the existing hard drive, changed the jumper to master and connected the ATA Master connector in the new WD 200 GB SE hard drive. Voila! I was up and running!
Performance
Past testing indicated that the difference in cache size really didn’t matter all that much. I wanted to test that with this newer drive, to see if that held true. I already own a Seagate 120GB drive with 2MB buffer, and that was the performance champion out of the disks I had up to this point. WinBench 99 is my choice for performance testing of hard drives, as it is a fairly universal testing platform used by magazines such as PC Magazine. The results from the head to head matchup follow:
WinBench 99 Business WinMark:
WD 200 w/8MB: 11,100 Kb/sec
SG 120 w/2MB: 7,600 Kb/sec
WinBench 99 High End WinMark:
WD 200 w/8MB: 26,600 Kb/sec
SG 120 w/2MB: 22,200 Kb/sec
The results show that in typical usage for business applications such as Word, Excel, etc. you would see a performance gain by using the 200GB WD with the increased cache size. This extends over into the High End test, which uses programs such as PowerPoint, Micro station and AutoCAD for testing. This did surprise me, as I had not noticed the benefit of the 8 MB cache previously.
HD Tach is another test which can bench your hard drive, and in this case the testing results were as follows:
Random Access time:
13.4ms
Burst Read speed:
86.7 MB/s
Average Read Speed:
53.2 MB/s
Average Write Speed:
22.07
Overall, this is definitely a high-performance drive that is speedy enough to feed the processor data and store it quickly, even in intensive applications.
**Note: All tests were completed with the same system components other than the hard drive, which you can find below**
Reliability
In my personal experiences with Western Digital drives, they are very reliable. I have never had an issue with even one of the 10-15 drives I have used personally. You should read up on the WD hard drives, however, as I have noted many folks claiming faulty drives that develop bad sectors. There is one quirk I found while perusing the WD homepage. The bare drive that I bought that does not come with cables, etc. carries a 3-year warranty. The same drive in a retail kit comes with a 1-year warranty. I don’t know why this is, but if you plan on using this drive for a long time to come, definitely go with the bare drive.
One other item to note: No matter what hard drive you buy, whether Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc. you should not rely on the drive to never fail. Develop your own backup solution to protect your data. You can use Ghost or Drive Image 7 to store images for safe keeping, you can buy an external hard drive to store the image to, or you can buy two drives the same size and set up a RAID 1 array in your computer for an exact copy at all times. Whichever method you like, do it. Don’t rely on any manufacturer, as all drives will eventually fail!
Conclusion
This drive performs very well and is quite speedy. It has a larger capacity that the previous drive I was using, and with my budding DVD backup collection, space is becoming an issue. I like the drive so far, and do not believe that I will have any reliability issues. However, if they do arise, I have my backup plan in place. Overall, I recommend this product highly, and suggest you look for a great deal to get the price to fewer than fifty cents a Gig.
NOTE:If you would like to run your hard drive on WinBench 99, you can download it here:
http://www.veritest.com/benchmarks/winbench/default.asp?visitor=
For purely running the two tests I used, download the smaller file which is around 9MB in size.
Test system/My home rig
The system I currently run is as follows:
Abit IS7-E motherboard
Pentium 2.6c processor
Corsair PC4000 Twin XMS 1024MB DDR memory
eVGA.com 5900SE
Seagate 120GB Hard drive
You can find reviews of each component by clicking on the link above.
Recommended:
Yes
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