List Price: $269.99
Sale Price: $219.99
Today's Bonus: 19% Off
Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program Western Digital (WD) makes excellent hard drives and this Desktop Performance is another in that long line.
WD has decided to move away from drive colors and use names instead. This particular review is of the Performance hard drive. Don't tell anybody, but this is really a Caviar Black hard drive. That's a really good thing. Black drives have been WD's performance line of hard drives for a long time. In fact the label on the disc says Black, not Performance. Their other drives are now called Mainstream, but don't tell anybody those are really the Green drives. That's not exactly the best thing in the world, green drives are fine, but they are slower and tend to go to sleep a lot faster. And then there is Network, or the secret is, those are the Red drives. Red drives are designed to be on 24 x 7 and accessed constantly. They are not super-fast, but are rugged.
Performance drives are 7200 RPM. Mainstream drives are 5400 RPM. And Network drives are just special. This drive has a five year warranty.
A 2TB drive is the sweet spot to install inside your computer; this is the largest easiest drive to install. When you get to 3TB and larger, there are some weird little hoops you have to jump through with Windows before you use the drive.
Installation was super simple once I had all my hardware assembled. The drive comes with four screws (I guess that makes this a retail package kit). Basically find an open drive bay in your computer. Slide the drive in and attach the four screws (there are mounting holes in the standard places on the sides and bottom of the drive). You'll need a SATA power connector; this is a thin wide plug that has an L shaped slot in it. You will also need a SATA cable, the retail kit does not come with a cable. And you'll need an open SATA slot on your motherboard. Plug in the power and the SATA cable. Then boot up the computer.
There is a strange moment with software. If your computer is running XP, you will have to go to the WD website and run a special piece of software to make a 2TB drive work. Otherwise for Win 7 and 8, the OS will eventually install a driver. Once that is completed, right click over the My Computer, and select Manage. In the box that opens there is a panel on the right side that will have Storage listed. Double click on Storage and then Disk Management. All the hard disks (internal and external), optical drives, and card readers you have on your computer will now show up. There will be a brand new drive that isn't allocated. Right click on that drive and select Format. Windows will now take you through a wizard to set up the hard drive. The simple path, choose a letter (the one given is probably fine), type in a name you like for the drive, leave the next default alone, and allow a quick format. The computer will now format the drive and after a short time it will now be available to use. Not necessarily intuitive, but not hard to do.
Oddly, I happen to have three different Western Digital drives in my computer Red (3TB), Green (3TB), and the new drive, Black (2TB); and a WD 3TB external USB 3 drive. I used Performance Test 8.0 to compare the four drives. Well as expected, this new drive is darn fast. Of all the drives it is the fastest. This drive, Black, gave a passmark score of 1059 and 11.8 Mb/sec random read write. The Green drive was the slowest with a 910 and 9.7 Mb/sec. The Red drive was between the two, 977 and 7.9 Mb/sec. And no surprises the external drive was in a totally different league, 695 and 3.3 Mb/sec.
Bottom line, this Performance drive is outstanding. It is fast and has a long track record of being a reliable drive (black caviar drives have an excellent reputation).
0 comments:
Post a Comment