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Advances in New Western Digital Drives
An anonymous reader writes "The Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB hard drive has 300 MB/sec transfer rate the drive has a monster 16 MB cache, both of which should make it one of the best performing 7200 RPM drives on the market. WD categorizes this drive in the "Highest Performance" section of its desktop market, so its safe to assume that is has solid performance without the expense of an enterprise level drive. With products like this available, advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing, especially considering the price level of this drive."
WD released this drive at least 3 months ago, and other drives with 16mb caches have been out even longer.
This is just another useless anonymously submitted article by Sal Cangeloso that may in fact be a slashvertisement. Notice the price listing on the first page, unless of course you have your ads blocked.
I wonder how do paying subscribers feel about seeing ads before everyone else!
Yet Another Press Release. Nice to see that Taco's tight editorial control hasn't been impaired by too much turkey. The guys at XYZ Computing are giving each other high-fives right now.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Thank you Slashdot, for bringing to my attention this exciting new service or product!
File this under "Ads that matter".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Please come out with a larger, slower drive for those masses of us who want to store very large quantities of data but don't care so much about 7,200 RPM or large cache sizes and whatnot.
When will the 1TB hard drive come out? When oh when?
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1. I don't like the warranty
2. I've had bad experiences with WD drives
3. I've had great experiences with WD drives
4. 250 GB isn't really 250 GB*
5. This review isn't comparing similar drives
6. My RAID array is faster
7. RAID-0 isn't really redundant
And my quick summary of the aritcle:
$125 (50 cents per GB)
SATA
Not the fastest drive on the market
*In this case, the formatted drive really does hold 250 GB
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Its getting more and more annoying...
So this drive is great... says WD.
So obviously is MUST be great.
And i really like reading that it has a 16" monster cock... ^h^h^h^h^h^..^h 16Mbyte monster cache. You can really feel the journalistic integrity OOZING out between the letters. I mean, thats SOO great considering that currently my windows uses 360Mbyte as file cache, connected with 6.4Gbyte/s.
And a 250Gbyte drive is SOOOO revolutionary. I mean, thats the smell of the future. Almost as if we were already in the 3rd millenium.... oh wait, we ARE there, and drives of this size have been around for 2.5years+ already.
And Sata-2 transfer limits are SOOOO useful as a dazzling number when your drive barely reaches 70Mbyte on the outermost tracks for the first Gbyte.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Compare a video card from today to one two years ago, and do the same thing with hard drives.
I'm trying, but really the VGA plug won't fit the IDE connector. I'm so confused...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"With products like this available,"
Yup, drives like this have been around for the last 6-12 months. They've probably shipped tens of thousands of them and you think they're cutting edge?
"advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing,"
Not really, have a look at the access time - 8.9 ms - this drive is just as fast as one from 8 years ago, it's just bigger. And guess what? that's why it has a 16MB cache. More platters, more heads, more cache plus greater data density equals... same access times. Hard drives don't scale up as well as other technologies.
"especially considering the price level of this drive"
Hang on a second, you can get cheaper than this. You can also get WD Raptors, which although smaller in capacity, are much, much faster. In fact, this is just a hard drive, like many other hard drives.
These are the stories I hate. Pointless, heartless drivel passed by the editors who well, don't really edit, and appear to be out of touch with their readers, not to mention their market segment. An absolute, total and utter waste of screen inches - the kind of crap I'd expect to spout forth from a zit-faced store assistant who didn't know a molex connector from his arse. An embarrassment to read on Slashdot really. Shame on you.
Ok. All slashvertisement comments aside, I get as excited about 'teh new hotness' in drives as much as the next person. But this is SO poorly submitted. 300MB/sec? PLEASE. You MIGHT get 70% of that speed doing a transfer from that 16mb buffer to the controller, but that is just misleading. Without even reading, I'm guessing they're talking about 3Gb/sec SATA-II. Woo. So that is wrong. "Interface Speed" is what you wanted to say there. Not "Transfer Rate".
What about "WD Characterizes this as the highest performance section of the desktop market." Wrong again. Helooo??? Raptor??
I mean. Talk about something cool, at least. New TCQ optimizations? Read-before-write? 24/7 100% duty cycle?
SR is a decent place to check out reviews and benchmarks. Do your homework! Astroturf like this only spreads confusion and disinformation.
I got a 15k RPM SCSI drive from hypermicro. It is a seagate, 73gb. It was only about $250 with an adaptec controller (which wasn't a whole lot more than a WD74 gb raptor at the time). At the beginning of the disk, it has over a 90Mbyte xfer rate on a 160mbyte/sec interface, which totally crushes all this other crap. My drive is (was?) the leading drive on non-raid configurations on hdtach's website, even against the 400gb SATA WD behemoth. 2x36gb raptors are about the same speed as one decent 15k RPM scsi disk.
I haven't really looked, but I would guess the drive in the post is what.. neighborhood of 60mbyte/sec? 70? Meh. Meh I say. We didn't even talk about I/Os/sec. between 7200 rpm, 10k RPM and 15k RPM.
The idea of an article like this on slashdot is not bad. It is just that this article is misleading and/or wrong and isn't really news at all. And so on and so forth.