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Western Digital WD5000KS Hard Drive

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

This drive from Western Digital is meant for entry-level

server storage.  high performance computing and data transfer intensive

tasks. The WD Caviar SE16 is a 500 GB drive with a spindle speed of 7,200 rpm.

It has a buffer memory of 16 MB, which is what makes it suitable for server

class applications.

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The drive is designed to be cool and quite during

operation. It has support for the next generation SATA, which has data transfer

rate specification of 3 Gbps. The first generation SATA only supported 1.5 Gbps.





Price:
Rs 16,000 (1 yr warranty) 


Key Specs:
500 GB, 7200 rpm, 16 MB cache memory
Contact: Champion Computers, Delhi

Tel: 26214751 E-mail: champion@usa.net

We tested the drive with an Athlon FX55 machine with 512 MB

RAM. To judge the overall performance, we used the WinBench 99 benchmark. The

drive showed overall good results in the benchmarking scores.

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On comparing with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K500, the WD Caviar

SE16 led  in the scores. It gave a score of 17.2 MBps in Business Disk

Winmark, as against the 12.7 MBps of the



Hitachi




.

In High-End Disk WinMark scores though, the drive gave

slightly lower performance. It gave 38.7 MBps as against 40 MBps scored by the



Hitachi




drive. However, there was a major difference in the average data transfer rate.

The WD drive clocked 58.3 MBps, while the



Hitachi




was way behind at 48.3 MBps.

The disk-access time of the Western Digital drive was 13.6

ms against the rated 8.9 ms and the CPU utilization was a whopping 96%.

Bottom Line:  This drive is sure to give better

performance for high data transfer rate-intensive tasks like graphics and

high-speed business computing. This will definitely increase the performance of

your workstation manifolds. Overall, it gives a  very good pe rformance and

comes with an affordable price.

Anubhav Verma

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