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 (4 star rating)
Background
I recently purchased a custom built PC, and one of the stipulations I had before ordering the PC was that I be able to choose the components used in the system. I did not spend a lot of time researching which hard drive to get, and chose the Western Digital WD1600JD based on the price and the reliable reputation of Western Digital. I have used Maxtor hard drives in the past, but chose to go with the WD1600JD instead of a Maxtor drive because the WD1600JD was on sale at Newegg.
Basic information
This hard drive is your basic SATA (Serial ATA) desktop variety. If your motherboard does not have a SATA connection, you will need to purchase a separate SATA card to connect the drive to. SATA is a new hard drive interconnect standard that replaced ATA, also know as PATA (Parallel ATA). The two main advantages that SATA offers over ATA are higher maximum throughput speeds (150 MB/s vs. 133 MB/s) and a smaller cable and connector. It is important to note, however, that hard drive internal data transfer speeds only rarely reach even 100 MB/s in burst mode. For the most part, only a few high-end hard drives, such as the Western Digital Raptor, will make use of the additional throughput of this type of interconnect. The smaller cable and connector allow better airflow inside your case, helping to keep the hard drive and other PC components cool.
This drive rotates at 7,200 RPM and has an 8MB cache. This, again, is pretty much the standard for desktop hard drives. Some drives only have a 2MB cache, while some other (usually bigger) drives have a 16MB cache. The size of the cache will have an impact on the performance of the drive the general rule to follow is that the bigger the cache is, the faster the drive will perform. But, larger cache usually means a larger price tag, so 8MB is a good middle-of-the-road choice.
Installation
I did not personally install this drive, but I spoke with the person who built my PC about his experience. Installation of this hard drive was frustrating simply due to the fact that the included SATA controller drivers came on a 3.5" floppy disk. Now, if I had purchased this drive a year or two ago, I could understand why the drivers would come on a floppy disk instead of a CD. But with the cost of manufacturing CDs so low, I cannot understand why a company would choose to include the drivers on a floppy disk instead of a CD. Heck, AOL gives CDs away as a marketing tactic. When you are a building a PC from scratch, and you don't plan on installing a 3.5" floppy drive (I have no use for floppy disks, so did not plan on installing a floppy drive), this may pose a problem. It certainly was a problem in my case because Windows was not detecting my hard drive. If Windows doesn't detect any hard drive, it will not boot under any circumstances (even from a CD). After trying a couple different approaches to get Windows to recognize the drive, I finally relented and paid to have a floppy drive installed. After installing the floppy drive, the installation went smoothly using the included drivers on the floppy disk.
It is important to note that with almost all SATA hard drives, your power supply needs to have a SATA power connector in order to provide power to the SATA drive. This is not the case with the Western Digital Caviar line of drives, as they feature a FlexPower technology that allows them to accept either the old IDE power connector or the new SATA power connector. With most SATA drives, if your power supply does not have SATA power connections, you either need to purchase an adapter separately or buy a newer power supply unit that has SATA connectors.
My use of the hard drive and Performance Results
I've used this drive for over 2 months now, and I have gotten good results with it . It has performed well and has met my expectations - it has run all my games and applications faster than my old Maxtor 80GB drive, and has run them without any problems or excessive noise. It is fairly quiet, and I rarely hear it above the noise of my power supply and case fans. When I do hear it, it is usually during heavy loads for reading / writing data. The manufacturer lists the noise level at 33 dBA for when the drive is idle and 34-35 dBA for when the drive is seeking / writing.
To measure performance, I used HDTach 3.0. This is a freely available utility that you can download from the web.
HDTach 3.0 Read Only Benchmark Results:
Seek Time: 14.1 ms
CPU Utilization: 4%
Average read speed: 48.2 MB/s
These results are middle-of-the-road and compare similarly to other 7,200 RPM drives with 8MB cache.
Conclusion
Overall, I am satisfied with the Western Digital Caviar 160GB hard drive. For the amount of money I paid for it (I paid $80), it is a good value. Other than the installation issues, it has performed well and is reasonably quiet. It provides a sufficient amount of space for all my data storage needs, and as long as you have a floppy drive to use for the installation, I recommend it.
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