Shiroth's Full Review: Western Digital Caviar® Special Edition WD800...
When it became overly apparent that my Maxtor 40GB 5400 RPM hard drive just wasn't cutting it in the performance department, I decided to look for a drive with a bit more punch. I did loads of research, looked at at least 20 hard drives, but the Caviar SE always ended up at the top of the heap. I drove down to CompUSA the next day and picked it up for $159.99, and with a $60 rebate that i'll see when i retire, the total comes to $99.99.
Cost wasn't the only issue, however. The Caviar SE models (120, 100, and 80 GB) also have 4 times the cache memory, 8MB as opposed to 2. This increase allows the hard drive to cache a larger amount of heavily-used data, thus improving performance, as cache memory is much much faster than any hard drive can be.
I never knew how bad I had it until I bought this beauty.
Before I installed it I ran the PCMark2002 benchmark from MadOnion.com on my old hard drive, just to get an idea of what kind of speed increase I was going to see.
I then spent the requisite hours upon hours putting my new hard drive in, partitioning, reinstalling the OS, reinstalling drivers/software, etc. (The hard drive went in quite easily, but I like to reinstall everything to get the best performance out of the new drive.)
After everything was installed, I ran the PCMark2002 benchmark again.
The new Western Digital drive's results:
Cached File Write 21.1 MB/s
Uncached File Write 29.9 MB/s
Cached File Read 38.6 MB/s
Uncached File Read 39.7 MB/s
File Copy 11.7 MB/s
HDD Score: 942
Writing transfer times were 5-6 times faster, with increased performance in reading and file copying as well.
Benchmarks are just an indicator, of course, but I have noticed a marked increase in speed with every application I run.
I highly recommend this drive for anyone looking to expand their available storage, replace a faulty drive, or just replace one for better performance, and while it might not outperform SCSI drives, for the money, one cannot find a better or faster drive.
[Edited 7/21/02]
The Caviar SE models also spin at 7200 RPM, and are Ultra ATA/100 compatible. I figured the large cache would increase performance much more than buying an Ultra ATA/133 drive (and card) would, not to mention being cost-prohibitive.
[End edit... Thanks to opinionated3 for pointing out my omission.]
WD Caviar Special Edition hard drives are designed to maximize desktop computer performance for activities requiring high performance hard drives such...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
80 GB Ultra ATA/100 internal hard drive 7200 RPM, 8 MB buffer Up to 100 MB/s burst transfer rates; data protection enhancments 40-pin EIDE Fits 3.5-in...More at Amazon Marketplace
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