The Mobile Storage Giant: A FireWire Hard Drive From Western Digital
FireWire Drive: Technical Data
Western Digital FireWire Drive | |
---|---|
Capacity | 60, 80, 120 GB |
Rotation speed | 7.200 rpm |
Seek time | 8.9 ms |
Cache | 2048 kB |
Guarantee | 1 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
Test System | |
---|---|
CPU | Intel Pentium 4, 2 GHz |
Motherboard | Soyo P4I Fire Dragon, i845 DDROn-Board IEEE1394 FireWire Controller |
RAM | 512 MB PC2100 DDR-SDRAM,CL2 (Corsair Micro) |
FireWire Controller | Texas Instruments |
Graphics Card | nVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra,64 MB DDR |
Network | 3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit |
Operating System | Windows XP Pro 5.1.2600 |
Benchmarks & Measurements | |
Office Applications Benchmark | ZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk Winmark 2.0 |
High-end Applications Benchmark | ZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 2.0 |
Low Level Benchmarks | HD Tach 2.61 |
Performance Tests | HD Tach 2.61 |
Drivers & Settings | |
Graphics Drivers | nVIDIA Reference Driver 28.32 |
FireWire Driver | Windows XP Standard |
DirectX Version | 8.1 |
Resolution | 1024x768, 16 Bit, 85 Hz |
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