So...who's got the new Western Digital AAKS series drive?

Participant · 4 Mar 2007 at 15:24

Haven't seen a review yet, just wondering what people think of them in all aspects, cause my upgrade is coming soon and I'm wanting to hear the pros and cons of these vs the Seagate 7200.10 series.

afraser2k · 4 Mar 2007 at 15:50

XBitLabs seems to think highly of them in this review of various 400 Gb drives especially focused on RAID. I'm considering getting a couple of them myself.

Participant · 4 Mar 2007 at 16:02

Just looking on another site and they list another model, the WD5000YS, which Gb for Gb is more expensive than the 5000AAKS.

Comparing the two it seems that the AAKS doesn't support NCQ whereas the YS does - can someone confirm this?!

Dan2kx · 4 Mar 2007 at 16:48

i have a 500gb AAKS drive and its very quick, the YS drives are the newest models to my knowledge and they are designed more specifically for RAID systems in that they are more reliable and stable according to the pages in OcUK the latter "RE2" drives do support NCQ.
I myself am interested in 2 of these 500GB YS drives and configuring them in RAID 0 and using them as storage drives. havent completely decided weither i trust 100% to put all my data and media files on them though so have been investigating Network Attached Storage as an alternative, but it seems these dont perform as well transfer wise as i had previously thought.

Dan2kx · 4 Mar 2007 at 16:50

oh and apparently the seagate drives are very noisy

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17650340

rpstewart · 4 Mar 2007 at 19:48

Dan2kx said:
i have a 500gb AAKS drive and its very quick, the YS drives are the newest models to my knowledge

The YS model drives are the "RAID Optimised" versions of the older KS series drives and as a result are slower than the AAKS.

Dan2kx said:
oh and apparently the seagate drives are very noisy

Yes, some people have had noisy 7200.10s, many others, myself included, have 7200.10s which are virtually silent.

Robbie G said:
Haven't seen a review yet, just wondering what people think of them in all aspects, cause my upgrade is coming soon and I'm wanting to hear the pros and cons of these vs the Seagate 7200.10 series.

There are plenty of opinions in this thread . It depends when you're planning on upgrading, the summer should see the arrival of the Hitachi 7K1000s and possibly the 7200.11s from Seagate although I wouldn't hold my breath for the latter, autumn is more likely.

chaparral · 4 Mar 2007 at 20:14

Robbie G said:
Haven't seen a review yet, just wondering what people think of them in all aspects, cause my upgrade is coming soon and I'm wanting to hear the pros and cons of these vs the Seagate 7200.10 series.

My HD tune test of my WD 500gb 5000AAKS SATA-II 16MB Cache drive (Drive went tested was in my external icy box case)

HD Tune: WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 41.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 85.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 69.9 MB/sec
Access Time : 13.4 ms
Burst Rate : 110.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 4.5%

Slackworth · 4 Mar 2007 at 23:44

rpstewart said:
The YS model drives are the "RAID Optimised" versions of the older KS series drives and as a result are slower than the AAKS.

Slightly true but the YS' were quicker than the previous KS.

naro · 5 Mar 2007 at 00:11

i'm interested to see a comparison of WD5000AAKS vs Seagate 7200.10 500gb vs Hitachi T7K500 500gb.

anyone have all 3 or 2 of them and benchmarked them??