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Western Digital WD5000KS Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bigger-places-to-put-stuff dept.

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."

10 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. link to printer friendly / single page version by Incitatus · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. MB/s vs MBit/s by pppppppman · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    1. Re:MB/s vs MBit/s by vojtech · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  3. heatmeter? by pppppppman · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    1. Re:heatmeter? by PenguSven · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      --
      What is...?
  4. Oh, the pornography! by Black+Parrot · · Score: 2, Funny

    500GB is a lot of naughty pictures.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    1. Re:Oh, the pornography! by HillBilly · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
  5. Re:Toast? by lakeland · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  6. Other reviews by jarik2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Other reviews by joib · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.