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

 

Conclusion

As the test results show the Western Digital WD2000JB performed superbly, despite its massive size the speed remained high during sequential reads even to the maximum capacity of the disk. Seek times are extremely low and the drive consistently out paces drives of the same class. As shown in the Sisoft Sandra tests the drive under some conditions delivers the performance of a SCSI based unit. Considering the WD2000 is half the price of the similarly sized SCSI version this performance becomes all the more impressive. From a noise perspective half the volume of a similarly spec'ed drive is impressive. When moving back to using the IBM drive as my main drive I was initially annoyed by the loudness it expressed compared to the Western Digital. Looking at everything as a whole this package is hard to fault; every aspect just exudes class from the excellent package design to the exceptional manual. From a value point of view this drive is also excellent. You have a 200gb drive, with a PCI controller worth £30 added in for approx £145 (75p per Gb) and the performance to rival any drive in its class. A 3 year warranty is supplied with this drive and Western Digital customers have access to 24 hour customer support. Finally you have the bonus that the drive saves you time in every day use and I doubt many users could fill the drive to its capacity.

Although the drive did lose a couple of tests to the IBM drive I used for this review I can honestly say this did not show in every day use. I have been greatly impressed with the WD2000JB and would highly recommend it to anyone wishing to improve the performance of their PC or looking to move to a larger hard drive.