Western Digital WD5000KS Reviewed

Spinnerbait writes "Hothardware has a review of the Western Digital WD5000KS, a member of Western Digital's Caviar SE16 family. It's a 500GB SATA 3Gb/s drive, features a 16MB cache and a 7200 RPM spindle speed. WD's Raptor line, with their 10k RPM spindle speed, may have won the overall 3.5" desktop HDD performance crown, but they don't win any capacity battles. That's where the WD5000KS comes in. Up against Seagate's finest, the Barracuda 7200.10, the half-terabyte WD5000 holds strong performance metrics."

Comments

link to printer friendly / single page version

[Incitatus]

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=847

Re:link to printer friendly / single page version

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the print version, the internet the way it should be.

Re:link to printer friendly / single page version

[Mr. Jaggers]

Nope, looks like they are checking the referrer, and offering the print version to not-Slashdot.

Copy-paste the parent's URL, which is

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=847

(don't mod me up, and for God's sake, don't mod me down either! karma bonus relinquished as ritual sacrifice for good will...)

MB/s vs MBit/s

[pppppppman]

anyone know why the "Buffer To Host" speed is in MB/s when the "Buffer to Disk" speed is in MBit/s?

Re:MB/s vs MBit/s

[vojtech]

The answer should be obvious: To get higher numbers.

For "Buffer to Disk", there is significant overhead caused by encoding the data with error correcting codes, sectorization, etc. This can make it use 10-15 bits per byte, with the expected performance of a 748 Mbit/sec drive being around 60-70 megabytes per second at the beginning of the drive (where rotational density of bits is highest), with 30-40 megabytes per second at the end.

For "Buffer to Host", MBytes/sec is the traditional measure. The overhead on SATA is better than traditional PATA (where for UDMA133 it's about 50%). The raw wire speed of SATA-II is 3.0 Gbit/sec, so advertising 300 Mbytes/sec is beyond realistic - even the theoretical maximum is probably less due to overhead. In benchmarks the drive achieves 180 Mbytes/sec buffered reads.

heatmeter?

[pppppppman]

is getting a 9 on hothardware's heat meter a good or bad thing? Sounds terrible to me

Re:heatmeter?

[PenguSven]

I think "heat meter" is in reference to the name "Hot Hardware" if it is "hot", i assume it is good..

Re:heatmeter?

[dohzer]

All I know is that when it comes to HDDs, ***DON'T*** drop it like it's hot!

Toast?

[JimXugle]

My Samsung 300GB Drives (in Redundant raid mode) hit 70C at some times (like a simple NTFS defrag)... hot enough to cook an egg. So can these 500GB drives make toast if I slide some bread in the 3.5" bay between them?

Now I just need a watercooling kit to make my coffee in...

Re:Toast?

[lakeland]

70 degrees!? Assuming your drive is reporting correctly, you need to do something to cool that down - fans, adjusted airflow, passive cooling, etc. Anything over 40 degrees cuts down drive life and anything over 50 degrees is just asking for trouble. Peaking at 70, I'm surprised your drives are still running at all.

Re:Toast?

[WuphonsReach]

My Samsung 300GB Drives (in Redundant raid mode) hit 70C at some times (like a simple NTFS defrag)... hot enough to cook an egg. So can these 500GB drives make toast if I slide some bread in the 3.5" bay between them?

At 70C, your drive lifespan is probably going to be measured in weeks...

I'd peg it at a desireable temp is anything under 45C. And anything over 50C will likely kill the hard drive within a matter of weeks or months. Even if you take a drive that was running at 50C for a few weeks and cool it back down to 40C in a new environment, it's still very likely to fail in the short-term. As always, some drives are more susceptible to heat failure then others.

It doesn't take much to cool drives (fortunately). A small amount of airflow across the drive is enough to pull the hot air away from the unit and replace it with cooler air from outside the case.

My personal preference for difficult-to-cool systems are bay coolers where you take up 2 or 3 5.25" bays and install a kit with an 80mm (2 bay) or 120mm (3 bay) fan and put 2-4 hard drives into the unit. The 80mm units work well as a 2-drive cooler because you get a large air channel between the two drives and the fan moves quite a bit of air over the drives. Putting the full 3 drives into the 2-bay cooler results in insta-cooked drives if the fan stops (but with only 2 drives in the cooler, you have some leeway). Bay coolers do make it harder to swap drives after a failure, but most failures I've seen are heat-induced so it's a wash.

Ideally, HD temp should be roughly 5-10C above ambient (30-35C in a 25C room).

Alternately, you can use a good quality case with dedicated fans blowing over the hard drive mounting points. Or simply use a larger case which spreads the components farther apart (so that your CPU isn't heating up your GFX card which is then heating up your hard drives).

Re:Toast?

[inKubus]

Why aren't there more sensors in computer hardware. You'd think it'd be pretty easy to put a bunch of thermometers in every computer component and have a 1-2 hour running log of temps stored in a flash chip on the mobo (or an add in daugherboard powered by disk connector). Then if there was a failure, you could read the flash chip and display a graph of the last hour of use, see that the hard drive temp skyrocketed and then the computer exploded. Sort of like a "black box" for computers. Hell, you could even archive the last few Mbits of network traffic in the raw and the core dump. With flash down to around $30/GB (retail), why hasn't anyone done this?

Re:Toast?

[ars]

Um, yah, that's already there.

It's just that windows doesn't give you a built in way to see all those sensors.

Do a little googling. I know I have pretty graphs, with HDD temerature for each of my hard disks, CPU temp, and Motherboard temp. I also get graphs of fan speed.

On linux install sensord with the graph option. And also install munin.

Re:Toast?

[Anonymous Coward]

For windows, try SpeedFan.

Re:Toast?

[JimXugle]

Thanks for the info... I think I'll just have them out of the case until I can get my hands on a fan.

Re:Toast?

[WuphonsReach]

One last note. I just built a system this week using a pair of 10k Raptors and put those Raptors inside of that 2-bay 80mm fan bay cooler. Left a nice gap between the two so that the fan could move air across the top and bottom of the upper and the top of the lower one.

Idle temp is 30C (ambient in the room is around 26C) and the temperature only goes up to 33C under load. These drives feel nice and cool to the touch, even when both are chattering away under load. (I'm running a 24-48 hour burn-in at the moment.)

The temp delta between idle/active is probably another measure of how good your cooling system is for your hard drives. The less the temp changes the better. Usually I can keep it down to a 5C delta.

Re:Toast?

[JimXugle]

Well, I did some quick (and cheap) work with some cotton string, and I've (securely) strung the drives in 5 3/4" bays They're down to about 50C each, and I have the bay cover above them off to let the hot air exit the case.

Not ony did it cool the drives down, but it also cut down on noise.

My Captcha: "ascends"

Oh, the pornography!

[Black Parrot]

500GB is a lot of naughty pictures.

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[HillBilly]

pictures?

Videos is what you want, just play it and you have both hands free. With pictures you need one hand on the mouse to click through the pictures.

Not that I know.

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I know.

Obviously not. Brain the size of a planet under your desk and you still rotate pictures manually?

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[Yer Mom]

Opera has voice recognition...

(except it's only supported on Windows. Lazy!)

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[Kjella]

Videos is what you want, just play it and you have both hands free. With pictures you need one hand on the mouse to click through the pictures.

You'd think someone would come up with a way to click through the pictures automatically, almost like a slideshow. Oh, wait they did and long before a computer could play video too. Obviously someone didn't live through the era of 286/386 machines, 14.4k modems and gif images. (Yes, I know some of you downloaded ASCII images on your 300 baud modem, spare me the "when I was young" routine)

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[sgt scrub]

Oh like anyone here REALLY needs two hands.

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[Just Some Guy]

Hey, Taco, can we have a new "upper threshold" for browsing comments? Because if this comment is "+4: Informative", I don't think I can handle +5.

Re:Oh, the pornography!

[blahplusplus]

With pictures you need one hand on the mouse to click through the pictures.
Not that I know.

Obviously, or you would have known of the slideshow feature that allows you to be hands free!

Other reviews

[jarik2]

This drive has also been reviewed by SilentPCReview for those of us, who are more interested in noise than in performance. Another 500 GB Caviar model, the WD5000YS, was covered by StorageReview -- IIRC, the differences between those two drives are in the firmware.

Re:Other reviews

[masklinn]

Holy freaking hell, I hadn't seen that one... a 500Gb drive equivalent to Samgung's Spinpoint P80 when idle... This is frightening, I fear I found the next drive that will go into my system...

And it's beats the living crap out of the Spinpoint in seek noise... my god

Re:Other reviews

[joib]

AFAICS the WD5000YS tested by StorageReview, has a 5 year warranty, it's certified for RAID use, and has a 1.2 million hour MTBF at 100% duty cycle. And at least over here, it sells for the same price as the ordinary one, so IMHO the choice is pretty simple.

mmm 500 gigs is tasty

[Magnj]

I'm in the market for a big drive for school...this could be a winner

Don't try that at home kids.

[twitter]

In benchmarks the drive achieves 180 Mbytes/sec buffered reads.

That's especially true at home, where the average PC has a 32bit PCI slot with a 133 megabyte per second transfer rate. It's nice how the G4 has a 64 bit PCI bus and that the industry is moving to PCI express, finally. Unless you have the controller built into the motherboard or have a real bus, you can't expect anthing better than 80MB/s.

In the mean time, I'm happy with 80MB/s from a $40 used scsi card and equally cheap old scsi drives. Yeah, I wish they stored more, but five to twenty gigs is more than sufficient for normal daily use and everything else can go into not so slow storage on a run of the mill 8MB/s ide drive. Normal drives are more than fast enough for music, movies and all that jazz as you should suspect from having played such on PI and PIIs

Re:Don't try that at home kids.

[hklingon]

Actually, most modern chipsets (nforce4 939, i875 iirc, i915/i925/etc) support 66mhz on most, if not all, of the standard PCI slots.. so they'll top out around 266mbytes/sec. I found a program that would tell me what speed the slot was running at, but I promptly lost it again. Reviews such as this one amuse me. Not that I'm a scsi bigot, but when you can get a 160gb 15krpm 1 year warranty OEM seagate scsi drive + used adaptec 29160 for about the same price as a raptor... and the scsi disk makes the ide disk feel like a PIO disk from 10 years ago.. I have to wonder. These are nice for capacity, I guess.. I'd be pretty hapy if pci express scsi controllers were cheap.

Lazy reviewers

[fbg111]

Most of you are probably familiar with Sandra's Drive Index rating...[so I won't bother to explain it]

But actually, not all of us are. I'm ashamed to say I'm not. Please enlighten me. That's what I read reviews for.