We decided to include this drive in our test series purely as a point of comparison; the WD1000BB isn't even listed in the company's product catalog any more. It's equipped with 2 MB of on-board cache; those with 8 MB of cache are named WD1000JB instead. Even back when this drive first appeared, there were 7,200 RPM models available with UltraATA/100 interfaces to serve them.

It entirely predictable that this drive brings up the rear in our table of benchmark results. With data rates of 25-42 MB/s, such a slow-poke has no chance to win, place, or even show. By comparison, its access time of about 13 ms remains in the running, and its interface transfer rates also couldn't be much higher.