Items tagged with Western Digital
Most of you probably already know that 2.5" notebook hard drives typically aren't as big or fast as hard drives found in desktop machines. In case you aren't aware, most laptops are sold with 5400RPM hard drives that range from 60GB to 100GB. In contrast, most desktops are currently sold with 7200RPM hard drives with capacities of up to 1TB. Just like desktop hard drives, though, laptop hard drives have gotten quite a bit bigger and faster over the last couple years. While desktop hard drives hit 1TB (1,000GB) a while ago, laptop hard drives recently reached 250GB. At least one manufacturer will have a 320GB laptop hard drive available soon, but that still doesn't get us anywhere near...
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If you are in the market for a high capacity hard drive, the Western Digital WD7500AAKS 750GB SATA HDD we’ve just evaluated here at HotHardware will be of interest. This drive is relatively affordable despite its size and it strikes a great balance between capacity and performance. Here’s a snip from the article... “We aren't sure why Western Digital waited so long to offer a drive bigger than 500GB, but we are happy to see the competition heating up. Plus, with storage prices so low right now, Western Digital's move seems rather smart. The company can offer its flagship drive...
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For several months, the battle for the biggest consumer hard drive was only fought by Hitachi and Seagate. First, only Seagate was in it with its 750GB hard drive using perpendicular recording technology. Then, Hitachi decided to skip 750GB and go straight to 1,000GB (1TB). Seagate has announced its 1TB hard drive, but we have yet to get one in our hands or see it in the retail channel. Recently, a new combatant finally stepped into the ring as well: Western Digital entered the fray with a 750GB offering. We aren't sure why Western Digital waited so long to offer a drive bigger than 500GB, but we are happy to see the competition heating up. Plus, with storage prices so low right now,...
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WD SHIPS 750 GB DESKTOP HARD DRIVES INCORPORATING NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR COOL, FAST, RELIABLE PERFORMANCE New WD Caviar Hard Drive Implements Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) Technology LAKE FOREST, Calif. - June 4, 2007 -Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced it is shipping in volume high-capacity 750 GB Serial ATA (SATA) WD Caviar® SE16 desktop-class hard drives. Ideal for data-intensive applications, high-performance computing and multimedia systems, the WD Caviar SE16 750 GB drives deliver high performance with 3 Gb/s transfer rate, 16 MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). "WD knows that there is nothing...
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WD SHIPS INDUSTRY’S HIGHEST CAPACITY MOBILE HARD DRIVE FOR NOTEBOOKS AND PORTABLE STORAGE DEVICES New 250 GB WD Scorpio Drives Are WD's Second Generation Employing Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Technology LAKE FOREST, Calif. - May 21, 2007 - Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced it is now shipping its 250 GB WD Scorpio 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives. The drives employ perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to achieve the highest capacity available in a small form factor drive and have WD proprietary features that make the drive quiet, use less power and run at cool operating temperatures....
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Western Digital has finally released their first hard drives based on perpendicular drive technology. The 160GB 2.5-inch Scorpio drive has a SATA 150 interface with 8MB cache size and 5400RPM spindle speed. This brings Western Digital in line with similar PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) offerings from Hitachi and Seagate. Unlike traditional drives, PMR allows each data bit to magnetized and stored vertically on the platter vs linear. This allows for improved platter density and storage sizes. The new WD Scorpio 160 GB drives deliver the high capacity that many mobile computing users demand with WD's implementation of PMR technology, as well as exclusive...
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When your average thumb drive just doesn't have enough space for your data, you might be at a loss of what to do. Well if you're not interested in burnable media, or bulky portable hard drives, you might want to check out Western Digital's 6GB Passport Pocket Drive. It's slightly bigger than a flash stick, but houses a mini 6GB hard drive, and ensures compatibility with almost any computer through its USB interface. "Portable file storage is a field which is undergoing rapid advances every year. While burning information to DVD is still cheap and effective there are a number of other options which are viable, depending on the...
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Hello Everyone. If you are in the market for a high capacity hard drive, the Western Digital WD5000KS 500GB SATA HDD we've just evaluated will be of interest. This drive is relatively affordable and it strikes a great balance between capacity and performance. Here's a snip from the article... "If we were to play a word association game with a PC enthusiast and said "Western Digital," it's likely his geek reflexes would immediately trigger and force him to reply "Raptor" before he even realized he had spoken. Western Digital makes many more storage products other than just the speed demons known as Raptors, though. While it is easy to be enamored with the Raptors, they are relatively...
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If we were to play a word association game with a PC enthusiast and said "Western Digital," it's likely his geek reflexes would immediately trigger and force him to reply "Raptor" before he even realized he had spoken. Western Digital makes many more storage products other than just the speed demons known as Raptors, though. While it is easy to be enamored with the Raptors, they are relatively expensive and offer only a fraction of the capacity of the 500GB and 750GB behemoths currently on the market. Our labs were blessed with one such behemoth from Western Digital, the WD5000KS, which is a member of the Caviar SE16 family. This 500GB SATA 3Gb/s drive features a 16MB...
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The Tech Report has reviewed Western Digital's excellent Raptor WD1500ADFD. If you're unfamiliar with the WD1500, it's the latest member of the 10K RPM Raptor family, that features a 150GB capacity, a 16MB cache, and support for NCQ. It's a killer driver. You can read our review for reference right here. "For those with no desire to spend countless hours staring at the Raptor X's drive head dart back and forth across the platter, Western Digital makes the Raptor WD1500ADFD. This drive lacks a window, but otherwise, it's mechanically identical to the Raptor X - same spindle, cache, platters, and theoretically,...
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First we get windows on our computer cases, now we can get them on our hard drives too. Yeah it's nice, but not as nice as NCQ support, higher density platters, and a 150GB of space, all of which are features of Western Digital's new Raptor X."The performance results pretty much speak for themselves as we mentioned during the various benchmark summary pages. The new Western Digital Raptor X is the fastest hard drive we have ever tested at PC Perspective, and I see no reason why this shouldn't be the hard drive to own for the foreseeable future. Even though the burst rates weren't the highest we have seen due to the lack of a SATA 300 MB/s interface on it, the Raptor X showed far superior performance...
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What happens when you take the already fast WD Raptor 74GB hard drive, double the capacity and cache, add NCQ support, and throw in some performance enhancing RAID specific features? You get the new Raptor X, that's what. We took a look at this drive a few weeks back and loved it. Today, T-Break gives everyone their take."Western Digital officially won the heart of the enthusiast with their Raptor drives- they were the first non-SCSI hard drives that could spin at 10,000RPM and thus, produce some speedy results. It started with their 36GB version which was followed by the 74GB version and today, WD doubles that storage again to 150GB. However, doubling the storage capacity isn't the only thing...
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So how do you make a fast drive even faster? Well, you can always start by adding more cache, larger capacity, and even throw in Native Command Queuing. These features have been added to Western Digital's Raptor series, which already sports an SATA interface, and a 10K-RPM spindle speed. The drive is the Raptor X, and tonight The Tech Report takes the new drive for a spin. "The Raptor X shares the WD1500's updated internals, and apart from the better view, it's identical to its enterprise-class counterpart. But how does it perform? We've cornered one in our labs and subjected it to an exhaustive set of synthetic and application tests to find...
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Western Digital has earned themselves quite a reputation in the Computing Enthusiast market with their line of Raptor hard drives. Originally targeted as "Enterprise class" SATA variants of what WD had historically brought to market for high-end SCSI server storage solutions, the 10K RPM Raptor was an overnight success for end user performance freaks, including many of us here at HotHardware.com. WD's first iteration of the drive was a somewhat overly-svelte 36GB version that came outfitted with an 8MB cache. And it was actually not what one would term a "native SATA" drive, with a Marvell PATA to SATA bridge chip handling calls for the drive's SATA...
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Asetek introduces - New WaterChill 12V pump system with integrated reservoir and USB/Software Control Panel The NEW WaterChill 12V DC pump system with integrated reservoir and USB/Software-based control unit is the first of its kind. Packed with features and design that ensure every consumer with the markets best usability and developed especially for water-cooling this 12V pump system utilizes the ultimate balance between flow, pressure and power consumption (heat dissipation) for maximum performance. Ensuring uncompromising reliability in water circulation and maximum performance the 12V low noise pump system is the perfect match for ANY water-cooling set-up – customized or included in...
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Good morning everyone, NJ here with another edition of the HH times. With a few not so pleasant incidents over the weekend, the HH team was not in the best mindset. So, in hopes of starting the work week off right, I have a XL dose of juice for all of us. Here is your AM shot... Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA 10,000RPM HDD @ SystemCooling "The main barrier that hard drives face is that as opposed to other computer hardware they are still mechanical. Motors, platters, actuator arms and other components, all packed together in a small housing and asked to work in perfect harmony. To increase hard drive performance the answer is simple, increase the RPM (revolutions per...
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Western Digital's 18Gig Ulta ATA66 Expert WD-AC418000 EIDE Drive technology took another leap forward this year with the advent of the Ultra ATA66 standard. Hot Hardware took a close look at a 5400 RPM ATA66 drive a few months back. This technology was fairly new then and it is still early on for the ATA66 standard. However, with the recent addition of new motherboards that are able to support this new higher bandwidth standard and DMA66 drives, we felt it was time to look at another from this field. This is a run-down on a new drive from the perennial drive manufacturer, Western Digital. Western Digital has been around forever making high quality drives. Their reputation speaks for itself. They...
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