Conclusion: Exclusive Drive At An Exclusive Price
At this moment, Western Digital has done nearly everything right: the new models store much more data than the earlier generations of drives, are faster, run slightly cooler and are a tad less noisy (the latter of which is merely a subjective observation in this review). What doesn't fit into the picture is the access time, which is not very satisfactory. And then there's the price...
Our attempt to attain the capacity of the WD2000JB by using several smaller hard drives put this newest hard drive in a rather unfavorable light, because ultimately, you have to shell out $399 for the WD2000. For the same price, you can also get two 120 GB drives of the same type from Western Digital (also with 8 MB cache). And, for just slightly more money, you can even get three 100 GB to 120 GB drives from other manufacturers!
Therefore, capacity alone does not make a good argument for buying the drive, because our price/ capacity comparison above would give you 360 GB under ideal conditions. Even the performance of the new drive, which has been significantly increased, should easily be surpassable by using two other drives (not to mention three), thanks to IDE RAID.
Nevertheless, aside from the high price, no other weaknesses appear with the WD2000JB. Whoever buys the WD2000 will get the currently most exclusive hard drive. For $20-$30 less, a variant with only 2 MB is also available. Considering the price, however, you wouldn't want to do without this performance-boosting feature .
