WD500gb in this week only

ringo747

ringo747

ringo747

Soldato
Joined
1 Feb 2006
Posts
8,188
Amazing price on the 500gb disk from WD this week! Can anyone recommend these? Am on the hunt for some new disks and this would do my job nicely. Are they not as good as the re range?
 
I saw the price and thought woohoo :D am in the market to upgrade my storage so was looking for either 320GB or 500GB and with this now being sub £100 I am more inclined to go for this as its around the same price as the 320GB's.

So like the OP are these drives worth the investment?
 
It's a decent price for a decent drive, nothing special but if it's just for mass storage then special isn't vital.

The RE editions are designed for 24/7 operation and I believe have different bearings and motors but performance wise are identical to the SEs.
 
I'm also very close to buying one... My original plan was to get a third Seagate 250gb to put in my new IcyBox but may now buy the WD 500gb to put inside my computer, and transfer an existing 250gb into my caddy.

Anybody got any experience with the WD 500?
 
Hi,

I too am very close to buying 4 of these puppies for a RAID5 array.

Does anyone have a link to the detailed specs? I had a look on WD's site but I could only find the older 125GB/platter 500GB disks.

Does this new version of the drive include NCQ?

By the way, here are some reviews on an American site (I presume this site isn't a competitor to UcUK???)

Thanks,
Jack
 
Bought one of these from a competitor a few days ago (shame as it was around £90 too and i'm more inclined to buy OcUK), but i'll post some HDtach benches later this evening when I get home.
 
Im wanting a new hard drive, but i was looking at the RE's. why would i pay an extra £40 for a RAID EDITION? are the RE's worth the extra money?
 
Clowned said:
Im wanting a new hard drive, but i was looking at the RE's. why would i pay an extra £40 for a RAID EDITION? are the RE's worth the extra money?
Click to expand...
In a word, no. Not for a casual user anyway. The performance improvement is there, it's just nothing to write home about.

Does anyone know if the KS version can still be put in RAID though?
 
Clowned said:
...why would i pay an extra £40 for a RAID EDITION? are the RE's worth the extra money?
Click to expand...

As I understand it, the RAID edition disks are designed for 24/7 use. They use a different motor and different barings. I believe that the RAID edition has the same performance as the non-RAID edition but that the RAID edition has a much more favorable mean-time-between-failure.

The irony is, of course, that in some ways the reliability of individual disks is less important in a RAID array with redundancy (like RAID1, RAID5 or RAID6).

I'm almost certainly going to buy 4 of these non-RAID WD disks for use in a RAID5 array. I'd be more tempted to buy the RAID edition disk if I was going to be using the disk on its own (i.e. not in a RAID array) because your data is more vulnerable. If that single disk dies then you've lost all your data. If a single disk dies in my RAID5 array then all my data will still be intact.

Jack
 
Last edited:
Nice heads up dan_aka_jack.

£360 for 2TB's ain't half bad now.

edit: price/ratio is 0.18p per gigabyte á la 2,000,000MB's (manufacturer terms). :)
 
Last edited:
Yeah, this OcUK deal is awesome value. I've spent some time over the last few days looking at hard disks from several different suppliers and comparing the GB/£ ratio. This deal from UcUK weighs in at 5.6 GB/£ which is by far the best. The nearest is a 250GB WD drive availabile for £48 which comes in at 5.2GB/£. Not surprisingly, the worst value drive in terms of GB/£ that I looked at is the 750GB 7200.10 Seagate drive (3.5GB/£).

I wonder if OcUK should start publishing GB/£ ratios with all their drives?!? You know, like supermarkets do with washing powder and stuff. ;-)

Does anyone know exactly when this OcUK deal ends? Does it end tonight?!?
 
Last edited:
Cool, thanks for the reply.

Do these drives come with SATA cables? I assume not.

Do these drives accept 4-pin Molex PSU connectors or do they only accept SATA power connectors? The picture shows a drive that can accept both SATA power connectors and 4-pin Molex connectors but I'm not sure how much faith to put in the picture?!

Thanks,
Jack
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom