Seetled on a new hard drive,opinions please.

Jimbo

Jimbo

Jimbo

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The model I went for in the end is this...

320 Gb Western Digital WD3200AAKS Caviar SE16, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms

Did I do good? I got it for £56 :)

EDIT:

I just thought is this drive SATA 2?


320 Gb Western Digital WD3200AAKS Caviar SE16, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms

Manufacturer code WD3200AAKS

Overview
These high capacity drives are designed to be used with todays newest connection - Serial ATA. Providing more bandwidth and advanced features such as NCQ, Staggered spin up and much more, these drives are ideal for todays systems which can have upto 8 SATA ports and support various RAID styles which are ideal for power users, people who want data security and much more. Please refer to the drives information for a full list of features. Remember the New SATA II Drives are backward compatible to SATA

WD WD3200AAKS 7200rpm next-generation SATA hard drive feature 320GB of storage with lightning-fast performance. Yes, these reliable drives are fast, but they still deliver technologically advanced acoustics and cool operation. Designed for high-performance computers, multimedia and gaming systems.

Whisper quiet
Cool operating temperature
Data Lifeguard
ShockGuard
>16mb cache

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=299

Its 300 MB/s so I take it its SATA 2 yes? :confused:
 
Last edited:
SATA has a nominal maximum speed of 150MB/s, SATA II is up to 300MB/s although again this is burst rate only since none of the current hard drives can sustain transfers anywhere near this rate so yes your drive is SATA II.

It is a good drive apparantly although I haven't tried one, £56 is a pretty fair price I think. :)
 
Great thanks, I bought it becuase I like WD and the AAKS drives are supposed to be very fast. :)
 
semi-pro waster said:
It is a good drive apparantly although I haven't tried one, £56 is a pretty fair price I think. :)
Click to expand...
I'd agree with that. The 500Gb version was on special here the week it came out, a lot of folk picked one up and were impressed by it.
 
So the boy done well. ;)

Good, this will replace my failing Maxtor 250 gig, the second same model to die on me, and a rma replacment jobby. Also hope to have a cooler system as the Maxtor really pushes out a lot of heat. The Caviar shall sit alongside my WD Raptor. :)
 
Nice was thinking of getting a 500GB AAKS, but went with the Seagate instead eventually think it was because of the longer warranty iirc
 
Got it in one. Go to WD's site or Seagate's site and you won't see a single mention of SATA2. Other suppliers such as Dabs don't use it either. OcUK unfortunately still loves to use it, despite it being technically incorrect.
 
Technically correct but it is somewhat pedantic, it is simply easier to use SATA II to denote the 300MB/s maximum throughput or indeed any additional features under the revised SATA specifications rather than SATA + 300MB/s + NCQ + staggered spin up etc. As the link above says the organisation used to be called SATA II which is partly where the confusion stems from anyway. :)
 
But also you then get people asking if a drive is SATA II or not (see above), and does it need special cables, is it compatible with SATA 1, etc, etc as they assume it to be a new standard rather than an incorrectly used term for a few optional enhancements to SATA. Questions like these I see frequently on other forums.

Don't get me wrong, I agree about the naming issues and SATA-IO haven't exactly made it easy or anything.
 
I'll try and remember in future but it does seem silly that SATA-IO have complicated the issue, particularly by not making all the features mandatory, if they had done then it would be two distinct standards rather than basic SATA with a variety of additions, some or all of which might be present. :)
 
I don't know about WD drives but with my Seagate 7200.10 I would have had to remove a jumper to enable 300MB/s transfer so I'd assume it is the same for WD i.e. just remove that one jumper is all, there aren't any other jumpers on SATA drives as far as I know due to them being on a channel of their own which negates master/slave designations. Hitachi are the only ones who require you to do anything other than a jumper setting as far as I am aware.
 
Shouldnt a raptor to a AAKS be faster than this? this was in Vista..

transferspeedraptortoaaks.jpg
 
In theory that should only be limited by the write speed of the AAKS drive but there are unfortunately other things to take into consideration here.
  • What else was using each disk
  • Was there any real time AV running
  • Are the files located toward the outer, faster portion of the Raptor
  • Are they being written to the outer part of the AAKS drive
  • Is there any bus contention between the two drives
 
Cant really answer those questions apart from yes, there was AV running Nod 32. I'm pretty happy with the drive its very quiet indeed and pretty damn nippy too. I reccomend. :)
 
I'd assume there is a version of HDTach that runs under Vista, have you tried it yet? I only use that sort of benchmarking tool to check I am in the right ballpark for performance but it may help a bit here. :)
 
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