The Mobile Storage Giant: A FireWire Hard Drive From Western Digital

FireWire Drive: Technical Data

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Western Digital FireWire Drive
Capacity60, 80, 120 GB
Rotation speed7.200 rpm
Seek time8.9 ms
Cache2048 kB
Guarantee1 year

Note that the guarantee covers only one year (source : Western Digital website), which is a relatively short amount of time. In Europe, the manufacturer guarantee has to cover a minumum of two years, according to a law which has been in effect since the beginning of the year. So in Europe, Western Digital (or the retailers) will have to comply with this rule.

In the hard drive sector, the guarantee usually covers three to five years ; here, the FireWire drive deviates from the standard.

The inner workings of this drive are from the well-known WD1200BB, which offers 2 MB cache and runs at a speedy 7,200 rpm. Happily, this FireWire drive has a very low noise level ; it’s only when it is used with a notebook that the noise is somewhat noticeable. However, this is not bad, considering that the average PC system is generally louder than this external drive.

Additional information about this drive can be found at the Western Digital website :

http://www.wdc.com/products/firewire120gb.asp

Test Setup

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Test System
CPUIntel Pentium 4, 2 GHz
MotherboardSoyo P4I Fire Dragon, i845 DDROn-Board IEEE1394 FireWire Controller
RAM512 MB PC2100 DDR-SDRAM,CL2 (Corsair Micro)
FireWire ControllerTexas Instruments
Graphics CardnVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra,64 MB DDR
Network3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit
Operating SystemWindows XP Pro 5.1.2600
Benchmarks & Measurements
Office Applications BenchmarkZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk Winmark 2.0
High-end Applications BenchmarkZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 2.0
Low Level BenchmarksHD Tach 2.61
Performance TestsHD Tach 2.61
Drivers & Settings
Graphics DriversnVIDIA Reference Driver 28.32
FireWire DriverWindows XP Standard
DirectX Version8.1
Resolution1024x768, 16 Bit, 85 Hz