Review by Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson
Design by Allan "Zardon" Campbell

Introduction
Thanks to our friends at Western Digital today we have a review of their high end ATA 100 drive. It comes with 8mb of cache and is 200Gb in size. It may be big but how does it hold up against mainstream drives with the same RPM and ATA speed?

Whats in the box?

Western Digital have pulled out all the stops on this item, from the packaging down to the free extras everything oozes quality. Upon opening the box you find the drive itself is suspended in the centre of the box with good clearance all around (roughly 1 inch in every direction) resulting in a very low chance of damage being caused to the drive during transit. The normal extras are included with the drive, 1 jumper, 4 screws to secure the drive and an IDE cable. The manual that is included is truly one of the best to be included with any PC component. Finally, included in the box is a free PCI Ultra ATA 100 controller. As Windows only supports hard drives up to 137Gb Western Digital have worked round this by adding a PCI IDE controller and driver disk to add support for the larger drive size.

With regards to the manual every possible step is documented. From as soon as you open the packing to when you have Windows up and running, even installing the PCI ATA controller is well explained. If you are new to hard drive installation you should have no concerns, there are clear and concise step by step instructions for all off the supported operating systems including detailed diagrams. Western Digital even cover all possible installation scenarios such as adding your new drive as a second drive or adding it as a new primary drive.

Also included in the package is Western Digital’s drive setup and maintenance software (Data Lifeguard Tools). The software, loaded from a bootable floppy disk, can be used to format and partition your drive or check and repair errors. It can even copy the operating system from your existing hard drive, resize the partition on the new drive and install your existing OS to the new drive. Meaning all of your existing programs and data are kept intact and there is no need for a reinstall!

Specifications: Interface: Ultra ATA/100 Capacities: Up to 250 GB Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal) Buffer Size 8 MB Read Seek Time (Average) 8.9 ms Write Seek Time (Average) 10.9 ms (average) Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average) Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average) Average Latency 4.2 ms (nominal) Buffer To Disk 736.0 Mbits/s (Max) Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100.0 MB/s Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s Formatted Capacity 200,049 MB

Cylinders 16,383 Number of Heads (Logical) 16 Number of Heads (Physical) 6 Sectors Per Track 63 Interface EIDE Actuator Type Rotary Voice Coil Number of Platters 3 Bytes Per Sector 512 User Sectors Per Drive 390,721,968 Servo Type Embedded Height (English) 1.028 Inches (Max) Length (English) 5.787 Inches (Max) Width (English) 4.00 Inches (+/- 0.010 inch) Weight (English) 1.32 Pounds (+/- 0.14 pounds) Operating Shock (Read) 20G, 2ms Non-operating Shock 200G, 2ms Idle Mode 35 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0 37 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 36 dBA (average)

Information here