Affordable and Reliable 80 and 160 GB Hard Drives

Western Digital WD800JB

Western Digital offers a whole slew of hard drives from 80 GB to 250 GB based on the 80 GB platter, so that it can serve every potential buyer it can. In place of 8 MB cache (Special Edition), all of the drives offer only 2 MB cache (-BB instead of -JB); however, in that case the warranty only runs for one year instead of three.

Compared with the WD2500 it has fewer platters, which impacts the overall performance to a certain extent: whereas the WD2500JB marches through all the benchmarks with decent values, the WD800 doesn't quite keep up. Scoring equally well in some tests, in others it does slightly worse.

The current WD800JB gives you a very fast drive that proves particularly impressive in terms of I/O performance. And, the hard drive is one of the cheapest models going in the 80 GB range.