Vincent's Rants

4-6-1999: Hard Drives, Chapter 2---Better EIDE Drives

Hello, and welcome to another Rants volume!

Western Digital was one of the leading HD manufacturers in the very early 90's. They pioneered the EIDE standard (called Fast-ATA by Seagate), and their Caviar line of drives was affordable, fast for the day, and reliable. The 31600 drives in that series were especially fast, and in fact we still run one here in the Tower, from 1995-1996 or so when they first came out. The later 21600 drives we not as fast in my experience. The first digit in their part numbers indicates number of physical platters, and the rest is the capacity in megabytes (so a 29100 would be a dual-platter 9.1 GB drive). Fewer platters means less power to run the drive, and higher density, but this does not mean improved performance, as the contrary can be true. Although I have never had a WD drive fail, I have serviced customer's systems where they have, and warranty replacement was always swift and with a higher capacity drive throughout the years.

What then caused the public to lose interest in tasting their Caviar recently? IBM, Maxtor and Seagate have taken advantage of some slow times in WD's sales with well-timed releases of much larger and somewhat faster hard drives. The IBM GXP's and Seagate Medalist Pro's spun at 7200 RPM, while the Caviar's stagnated at 5400 RPM. Until now, one of these two HD models were my choice for high-end systems that didn't quite have SCSI in the budget. But they generated lots of heat, and thus often required drive bay coolers or additional case fans for maximum longevity. They also are not easy or inexpensive to purchase. The IBM, however, did come in at least a 14.4 GB size,and the Seagate could be had as small as 4.5 GB, so there was several sizes to choose from. As the HD is often the slowest major component of a system, I usually rank speed as #1 priority, as capacity in the form of additional drives can be added much more easily than transferring the OS to a faster HD can be done. Of course, if you could get a 16-18 GB drive that was very fast, relatively affordable, and didn't run as hot, that would solve many problems and have a place in the market.

Western Digital's Comeback

WD wasn't just ignoring the market trends. They were waiting for the 1st generation of 7200 RPM EIDE HD's to mature. In fact, the Seagate Medalist Pro's have become hard to come by, so I'm not sure if those drives failed to capture sufficient market share, or Seagate just chose to shut down the line. Very recently, Western Digital announced it's new, Expert series of 7200 RPM EIDE HD's. Taking the best design points of all previous EIDE HD's, and then improving on them, WD made a drive series worthy of their reputation again. Below are the features of the two new, second-generation 7200 RPM drives (detailed specs can be found here):

• 9.1 and 18.0 GB sizes presently
• Ultra DMA-66 and older modes supported for up to 66 MB/sec
• GMR Head Technology for maximum density per platter
• Data Lifeguard technology to protect your data
• 7200 RPM Spindle Speed for lower latency & higher platter transfer rates
• 9 mS Average Seek time
• 2 MB onboard cache
• Runs cooler than other 7200 RPM EIDE HD's

Overall, these are the best EIDE HD's that you can buy today. Although I have not actually tested one yet, if all of the specs and the review I read are true, I heartily recommend them for any user who can squeeze them into their budget. This potentially pushes the crossover to SCSI drives a little higher on the performance scale as described in Chapter 1 of my Hard Drives rants, which you should still consult before purchasing a HD subsystem for your PC. If anyone in my local area wants to purchase one of these drives with or without installation services, let me know. Prices on items like these are quite volatile and I won't quote them here, but don't expect to spend much more than you would for the competition's drives.

Please note that when installing any HD (SCSI or EIDE) larger than 8.4 GB in Windows NT, that SP3 or higher is REQUIRED before you completely partition it, or you will lose a lot of space (over half on the 18 GB model)!

I have a lot more to say, but am too busy right now. I just wanted to get this information out ASAP in case any of you are buying HD's soon, sorry to you guys who just bought another drive a week ago. :-) Let me know if you'd like me to rant about a particular topic in the future.

Until then!

-Mr. Wizard

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Copyright © 1999-2003 by Vincent N. Robinson