The drives from Western Digital do not make use of an aluminum case, that's why we could feel hardly any vibration coming from the drives. The good impression stays after checking the noise level as well. Even though you can clearly hear the drive whistling, the noise does not bother at all. Most people won't have any reason to complain about too high noise level or about unwanted noises.

Both drives got good results in most real world benchmarks except the Highend Disc Winmark and the Seek Time tests. Nevertheless, you will get decent performers, even though the transfer speed tests (using the WinMark's Disc Inspection Test) don't attest to those drives being the fastest. Instead of heading for pure performance, Western Digital optimized other technical details, which don't seem to be that important on the first view. For example the CPU utilization time of their drives has been successfully reduced, requiring only half the time of all competitors in Windows 2000 and being among the most frugal models in Windows 98. That's also why the WD drives can keep up with their competitors in the Disc Winmark tests, even taking the lead in ZD's Content Creation Benchmark - although the pure data transfer speed is higher in all other models.

All chips are placed on the top side of the electronic board to avoid any kind of harm.

Here you can see the jumper block of WD hard drives. The jumper is on spare right now, while you can see how you have to plug it on for Master or Slave configuration.

Western Digital shows impressively that getting high synthetic benchmark results does not mean you have to have a fast drive. Both WD models basically cannot deliver the highest performance, so I would recommend others for hard disc recording or video editing. But they come with a good noise level, almost no vibrations, low working temperatures and brilliant electronics. When you add all these together, the Western Digital drives can be recommended for almost all users. Due to their smooth handling, beginners and noise sensitive persons should be happy with them.

Detailed specs on the Western Digital website: WD 153BA

Detailed specs on the Western Digital website: WD 205BA