Wd80jb...

[BBQ-J]

I read that Weastern Digitals new Specal Edtion HD is extreamly fast, even faster that SCSI and raid. I just got one and insalled it today but i couldnt tell any diffrence. Anyone else got one or know about it? any info would be great.

[sptw]

Hi BBQ-J,

Well, it's impossible to compare a single drive with Raid, and i assume here that you're talking about Raid0.Raid0 is a technique that stripe a file in small pieces and write/read it using at least 2 Hds, then it will be faster when compared to a single driver.Two WD 80Jb on Raid0, will be faster than one single WD 80Jb, 2 Maxtor 80GB D740X will be faster than one single WD 80JB.When we compare Hds, we have to do it using the same specs, same capacity level, same RPM, etc, etc ......About SCSI, it's another story, because SCSI works in a different way compared to IDE, but, in fact, for desktop usage, the JB bests all 10k RPM drives save only Maxtor's Atlas 10k III.Well, it's better not forget too that people sometimes want the performance of a 10k RPM SCSI drive without the SCSI card premium.You didn't mention your last hd, but i can tell you that this WD JB series continue to be the king of the hill on IDE land.IBM claim that their new 180GXP line is the fastest IDE HD on the market, but it's new for me, beside the fact that i haven't seen any review about it, then we have to wait for.....

[Player0]

Just to confirm with SPTW. I have been using the WD Special Edition drives since they have come out. I've use the 80g, 100g, and 120g... and they are the fastest IDE drives around right now for use in a workstation or home pc.

The WD800JB drive is probably *close* in speed with a good 10K U160 SCSI drive. However, the SCSI drives will be faster in almost all applications because the 10K drives have a 30% better seek time than IDE drives. 15K scsi drives are even better. Also, because of the nature of SCSI, there is a much lower system (CPU/PCI) load with using SCSI, which also boosts performance. SCSI drives have much better end-of-drive read times, burst read/write slightly faster than even top of the line IDE drives, and most come with a 5 year warantee and are designed to run 24/7. Plus you can have something like 15 drives per scsi channel (or is it 7?). So, comparing any SCSI drive to IDE is like talking about apples and oranges, even if the burst read measurements are close to the same.

In terms of comparing RAID? RAID-0 drives are almost nearly twice as fast as a single drive. If you had a choice between a single WD800JB drive and say, two WD400BB drives in RAID0 --- the slower drives in RAID0 would be faster than the single top of the line drive. However, there are other factors that come in to play.

WD SE drives are great, and I highly recommend them. The new WD drives (with larger platters) look great, as do the new IBM drives. I'm still scared of IBM a little after the problems with 75GXP and 60GXP, not to mention that the new IBM drives may only come with a 1 year warrantee (WD SE drives come with 3yrs). But the 120GXP seemed problem free and I can only assume that the new IBMs will be as reliable or better.

[Alexandrus]

I've played a lot with WD JB drives and they didn't seem that fast to me.
TO be honest, I am looking forward to the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drives with 8MB cache.