Super fast drive for audio and video.
Written: Sep 02 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: SCREAMING fast, very quiet, great price.
Cons: I don't know what to do with all this space.
The Bottom Line: Huge storage, super fast performance for the right application. Extra cost is totally justified if you have the need, but it's not right for everyone.
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| fizbeam's Full Review: Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 120.0GB Int... |
This is one of WD's few "Special Edition" drives, identified by the JB part of it's product code. For your info, the product codes are set up like this:
First part is always WD.
Second part shows the drive size.
Third part shows the speed. The AB drives are 5400 RPM drives (the cheap ones), BB drives are 7200 RPM, and the new JB drives are the special edition.
What's so special about them? These drives are ATA100 drives running at 7200 RPM. Just like the BB drives. However, the BB drives and most drives from the other manufacturers, have 2 MB cache built in the drive. The JB line has 8MB. This makes a HUGE difference when writing large amounts of data to the drive. This really comes in to play when you're doing audio or video work, where large amounts of data get transferred. For other things like gaming, this will make little difference, and for things like databases, where small chunks of data are transferred very rapidly, this probably won't make a huge impact. It's the large transfers that are affected.
The large cache not only speeds up your transfers, but it can also speed up your system when doing audio and video. Since these apps tend to be heavily processor intensive, they may write to the drive in bursts. Filling up an 8MB cache as opposed to a 2MB cache lets the computer spend more time thinking about your video processing and less time thinking about sending data to the drive. This can result in smoother playback.
Where you won't see a difference is on reading from the drive. The cache makes almost no difference in transferring off the drive. That's maxed out by the ATA100 bus and the 7200 RPM rotation speed. If you're very concerned about speed of data reads, or are writing many small things to the drive, like a database app, then you may want to consider an ATA133 drive instead.
One thing to be conscious of, the 100MB version of this drive is considerably slower than the 80 and the 120. The 80 and 120 use 40 GB platters (2 in the 80 and 3 in the 120). The 100 GB drive uses three 33 GB platters. This obviously means that the data density of the platters is lower on the 100GB drive and so transfers are slower because it takes longer for the heads to actually get to the data (it's more spread out on the platter). Spend the extra cash on the 120.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
fizbeam
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Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 1 member
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