 More net space and other advances for the popular Western Digital Caviar Green drives, but XP users approach with caution |
| Review Date: February 11, 2010 |
| Reviewer: snapcrackle, United States |
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD10EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital's popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It's a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it's the right drive for you.
The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters - so a 1TB drive has just two platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available - and has 64MB of cache.
ADVANCED FORMAT: There's another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512MB sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512MB logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides a 7-11% increase in formatted disk space, and improvement in burst speeds.
ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.
The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install - then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their "Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility" web page - anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.
So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say "WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7." This drive might not a good choice for some XP users - you'll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.
VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, "Western Digital's Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins." They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.
LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.
OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom's Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled "Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB," with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google "Pros And Cons Of Going Green." |
More net space and other advances for the popular Western Digital Caviar Green drives, but XP users approach with caution
|
| Review Date: February 11, 2010 |
| Reviewer: snapcrackle, United States |
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD15EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital's popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It's a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it's the right drive for you.
The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters - so a 1.5TB drive has just three platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available - and has 64MB of cache.
ADVANCED FORMAT: There's another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512MB sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512MB logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides a 7-11% increase in formatted disk space, and improvement in burst speeds.
ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.
The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install - then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their "Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility" web page - anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.
So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say "WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7." This drive might not a good choice for some XP users - you'll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.
VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, "Western Digital's Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins." They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.
LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.
OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom's Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled "Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB," with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google "Pros And Cons Of Going Green." |
More net space and other advances for the popular Western Digital Caviar Green drives, but XP users approach with caution
|
| Review Date: February 11, 2010 |
| Reviewer: snapcrackle, United States |
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD20EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital's popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It's a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it's the right drive for you.
The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters - so a 2TB drive has just four platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available - and has 64MB of cache.
ADVANCED FORMAT: There's another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512MB sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512MB logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides a 7-11% increase in formatted disk space, and improvement in burst speeds.
ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.
The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install - then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their "Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility" web page - anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.
So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say "WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7." This drive might not a good choice for some XP users - you'll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.
VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, "Western Digital's Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins." They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.
LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.
OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom's Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled "Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB," with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google "Pros And Cons Of Going Green." |
Nice Mainstream Upgrade
|
| Review Date: February 16, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Schwartz, Port Allegany, PA USA |
I purchased this drive to replace the drive in my Wife's computer that was running out of space. The PC was running Windows 7 and the drive being replaced was a WD3200KS 7200RPM drive.
PC the drive went into: Stock Intel Q6600, Gigabyte GA-EP45-D3SL, 8GB DDR2, and a ATI HD4870.
The Windows install wasn't that old and I didn't really want to mess with getting her all her stuff back so I used a Clonezilla Live CD to clone the old drive to the new one. I then booted straight into Windows 7 off the new drive. Windows asked me to restart so I did and the system was up and running without incident. I then went into the Windows 7 disk manager and extended the partition to fill the whole drive.
Knowing this was an Advanced Format drive but unsure if the alignment would be correct due to the cloning, I downloaded the bootable image for the align utility from the Western Digital site and burned it to a CD. I ran the utility and it indicated that the partition was aligned correctly and there was nothing that needed to be done.
The old drive showed as a 5.4 and the new one as a 5.9 on the Windows Experience Index. I didn't think that was too bad coming from an older 7200 RPM drive to this. I was a little worried it would be slower but that isn't the case. I haven't personally used the PC enough myself to know but my wife says she notices it is a bit faster and things are quicker to load.
This drive for me was a worthwhile upgrade and money well spent to this point. Only time will tell about the reliability as with any drive. |
Well packaged, runs good
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| Review Date: January 29, 2010 |
| Reviewer: shoottmx, Coast of Maine |
Other OEM hard drives have been knocked for poor packaging and resulting shipping damage. The drive I received was double boxed, with the inner box having molded plastic shock absorbers properly fitted on both ends of the drive essentially suspending it in the center of the carton. No worries about shipping damage now. The drive worked fine out of the box, created 2 partitions and formatted each in Win 7 and we're happpily saving tons of image files.
Gary |
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