Western Digital WD5000KS Reviewed 32
Spinnerbait writes "Hothardware has a review of the Western Digital WD5000KS, a member of Western Digital's Caviar SE16 family. It's a 500GB SATA 3Gb/s drive, features a 16MB cache and a 7200 RPM spindle speed. WD's Raptor line, with their 10k RPM spindle speed, may have won the overall 3.5" desktop HDD performance crown, but they don't win any capacity battles. That's where the WD5000KS comes in. Up against Seagate's finest, the Barracuda 7200.10, the half-terabyte WD5000 holds strong performance metrics."
link to printer friendly / single page version (Score:4, Informative)
Re:link to printer friendly / single page version (Score:1)
Copy-paste the parent's URL, which is
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?arti
(don't mod me up, and for God's sake, don't mod me down either! karma bonus relinquished as ritual sacrifice for good will...)
MB/s vs MBit/s (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MB/s vs MBit/s (Score:4, Informative)
For "Buffer to Disk", there is significant overhead caused by encoding the data with error correcting codes, sectorization, etc. This can make it use 10-15 bits per byte, with the expected performance of a 748 Mbit/sec drive being around 60-70 megabytes per second at the beginning of the drive (where rotational density of bits is highest), with 30-40 megabytes per second at the end.
For "Buffer to Host", MBytes/sec is the traditional measure. The overhead on SATA is better than traditional PATA (where for UDMA133 it's about 50%). The raw wire speed of SATA-II is 3.0 Gbit/sec, so advertising 300 Mbytes/sec is beyond realistic - even the theoretical maximum is probably less due to overhead. In benchmarks the drive achieves 180 Mbytes/sec buffered reads.
Don't try that at home kids. (Score:2)
In benchmarks the drive achieves 180 Mbytes/sec buffered reads.
That's especially true at home, where the average PC has a 32bit PCI slot with a 133 megabyte per second transfer rate [wikipedia.org]. It's nice how the G4 has a 64 bit PCI bus and that the industry is moving to PCI express, finally. Unless you have the controller built into the motherboard or have a real bus, you can't expect anthing better than 80MB/s.
In the mean time, I'm happy with 80MB/s from a $40 used scsi card and equally cheap old scsi drives
Re:Don't try that at home kids. (Score:2)
heatmeter? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:heatmeter? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:heatmeter? (Score:1)
Re:Toast? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Toast? (Score:2)
At 70C, your drive lifespan is probably going to be measured in weeks...
I'd peg it at a desireable temp is anything under 45C. And anything over 50C will likely kill the hard drive within a matter of weeks or months. Even if you take a drive that was running at 50C for a few weeks and co
Re:Toast? (Score:2)
Re:Toast? (Score:2)
It's just that windows doesn't give you a built in way to see all those sensors.
Do a little googling. I know I have pretty graphs, with HDD temerature for each of my hard disks, CPU temp, and Motherboard temp. I also get graphs of fan speed.
On linux install sensord with the graph option. And also install munin.
Re:Toast? (Score:2)
Idle temp is 30C (ambient in the room is around 26C) and the temperature only goes up to 33C under load. These drives feel nice and cool to the touch, even when both are chattering away under load. (I'm running a 24-48 hour burn-in at t
Oh, the pornography! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh, the pornography! (Score:4, Insightful)
Videos is what you want, just play it and you have both hands free. With pictures you need one hand on the mouse to click through the pictures.
Not that I know.
Re:Oh, the pornography! (Score:2)
Opera has voice recognition [opera.com]...
(except it's only supported on Windows. Lazy!)
Re:Oh, the pornography! (Score:1, Troll)
You'd think someone would come up with a way to click through the pictures automatically, almost like a slideshow. Oh, wait they did and long before a computer could play video too. Obviously someone didn't live through the era of 286/386 machines, 14.4k modems and gif images. (Yes, I know some of you downloaded ASCII images on your 300 baud modem, spare me the "when
Re:Oh, the pornography! (Score:2)
Re:Oh, the pornography! (Score:2)
Re:Oh, the pornography! (Score:2)
With pictures you need one hand on the mouse to click through the pictures.
Obviously, or you would have known of the slideshow feature that allows you to be hands free!Not that I know.
Other reviews (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other reviews (Score:2)
Holy freaking hell, I hadn't seen that one... a 500Gb drive equivalent to Samgung's Spinpoint P80 when idle... This is frightening, I fear I found the next drive that will go into my system...
And it's beats the living crap out of the Spinpoint in seek noise... my god
Re:Other reviews (Score:3, Interesting)
Lazy reviewers (Score:2)
But actually, not all of us are. I'm ashamed to say I'm not. Please enlighten me. That's what I read reviews for.