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Western Digital External Hard Drives 

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

We received two external 250 GB hard drives from Western Digital, both having pretty good features. The only difference between the two being that one had an 8-in-1 card reader and was called the Media Center. Both have 7200 rpm spindle speed and an 8 MB cache buffer. Both have USB and FireWire ports for connectivity, and even include a USB 2.0 hub. There are two buttons on the front panel for performing manual and automatic back up. The drives come with Dantz Retrospect Express back-up software. Plus, both come with a software called PhotoShow that lets you share your photos as musical slideshows. With such features, the drives can be used to store multimedia files from your camcorders, MP3 players etc. Or they can be used to back up your desktop's or notebook's hard drives. 

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We ran Winbench 99's disk tests to check their performance. These tests were run on a machine with a P4 3.2 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM and 7200 rpm HDD. We used the drives' USB 2 port for connectivity. They gave good results in all the tests except for Business Disk WinMark99, where they managed a score of 9420 thousand bytes/second. The results for Disk Access Time, Start/End Disk Transfer Rate and High-End Disk Transfer Rate were 9.42 ms, 36,600 and 54,500 thousand bytes/second, 36500 thousand bytes/second respectively. Compared to Maxtor's OneTouch 2 and Seagate's external hard drives, these gave a much lower access time, which is good. Lastly, we did a simple file transfer of 5 GB data and the drives managed to do it in 10 mins and 56

secs.

Bottom Line: Given their performance and features, the drivers are well worth the price.

Cybermedia Labs

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