As I was choosing the different parts to my new PC, I read review after review extolling the virtues of the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) but I couldn’t justify the $200 price tag. But, as luck would have it, I was scanning the weekly ad from CompUSA and found this very hard drive, regularly priced at $209.99, for $99.99 after a $30 price drop and an $80 rebate. One hundred-twenty gigabytes of hard drive space for under a hundred bucks is practically illegal. A gig of space for less than a dollar, that’s just unheard of. Of course I had to have one, so I headed down and picked up one of the nicest pieces of my new “rig”.

All the space you want
Barring any all-night download fests on KaZaA, you will be hard pressed to fill up 120 gigabytes of data anytime soon. That is a lot of space. I have my Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) setup as three different partitions. On the main partition (30 GB) I have my old system, a simple image of my previous computer’s hard drive. I have another partition (40 GB) for program files, so now whenever I install something it gets installed on my second partition. On the third partition (50 GB) I have all my media files. These include my MP3 collection and all my digital pictures. I will also use this drive to do video editing. Ever since my daughter was born I have been taking digital pictures by the dozens and I haven’t even made a dent in 50 GB partition.

The trend of software bloating to fill the growing space available to it is still inevitable but the savvy user can keep their usage under control, giving them plenty of room for important stuff like MP3’s and pictures of last month’s vacation. With that in mind, the user looking to seriously expand their digital waistline, to the point of gluttony, can look no further than the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) to satiate their storage space deprived system.

Seriously fine specifications
The Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) sports the following commonly quoted hard drive specs:

7200 RPM
Ultra ATA/100 delivers up to 100 MB/s data transfer rate
8.9 ms average seek time
8 MB buffer

In other words, the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) is able to perform admirably in any application. Many multimedia editing programs, especially video editing, are memory hungry and when your physical RAM is full, Windows looks to the hard drive for extra “memory.” If the hard drive has slow access times and transfer rates, your program will slow to a crawl. With a big 8 MB buffer (used to store data the hard drive “guesses” you’ll want next), a spin speed of 7200 RPM, and an Ultra ATA/100 interface, the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) will not cause a significant slow down when Windows makes heavy usage of it’s page file. This hard drive sails through data at a decent clip, barely causing a hiccup when heavy disk accessing occurs.

Hard drives can be a serious source of noise inside your case, especially drives that run at high RPM. Luckily the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) is pleasantly quiet. It isn’t silent but there is just a low volume hum every so often to remind you it’s still there. That is due to good design and quality components, which should translate into a long, healthy life.

But rest assured that if something bad does happen, Western Digital also includes a 3 year warranty which is now becoming rare in the hard drive world, with most companies opting for one year warranties. An unfortunate trend, but common among many hard drive manufacturers.

Installation doesn’t get any easier.
Installation was a breeze. See my installation guide for details of mounting the actual drive into the case and connecting everything together. Western Digital includes, on a 3.5” floppy, a great program called Data Lifeguard Tools™ that makes partitioning, formatting and imaging hard disks a snap. The disk is bootable, allowing you to handle all these operations before Windows gets its grubby hands on your hardware. The program recognized both my current hard drive (which was set up as the master drive) and my new Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) (which was naturally the slave). The program allowed me to both partition the drive how I wanted it (including format type) and image the master drive into one of the partitions on the slave.

Once the partitions were made and an image of my old system was copied, I flopped the drive assignments around, making the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) the master and I rebooted to a new happy system with space to spare.

Performance
For those of you who’ve forgotten, my system:

Asus A7N8X Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2600
512 MB PC2700 RAM, PNY Technologies
Asus V9280/TD GeForce-4 Ti4200 8X 128 MB Video Card (AGP)
Western Digital 120 GB HDD, WD1200JBRTL
Cendyne 48x24x48 CD-RW
ViewSonic A90 19” Monitor
Antec Lanboy Case with 350W SmartBlue ATX12V power supply
Antec 80mm Blue LED Fan

As far as hard drive performance is concerned, here are few benchmarks for those interested:
PCMark2002 Hard Disk Drive Score: 1031
SiSoftware Sandra File System Benchmark:30210 kB/s (this is an aggregate of buffered, sequential and random read and write tests)
Performance is more than adequate for all types of applications. Some online reviews have claimed that the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) performs on par with SCSI drives that run at 10k RPM, but I wasn’t able to reach the same performance. Nonetheless, this drive will out-perform a lot of drives currently available.

In Conclusion
The Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) is another five star product from Western Digital. Don’t be surprised that I have rated all the new components to my system with five stars. I have done my homework, lots of comparison reading, and I have chosen what I believe to be the best components, and the Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive (WD1200JB) is no different. It is a top-notch performer with speed and storage space for every application.


Recommended: Yes