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Review Date: July 5, 2002
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: Western Digital
Western Digital has long been an industry leader in magnetic storage technology, so it is no surprise that they once again have taken the initiative to surpass industry standards yet again with their "JB" line of hard drives.
The new line of JB series of IDE drives come in 80GB, 100GB, 120GB, and now 200GB variants. All spin at 7200RPM and boast a whopping 8 megabytes of cache memory, for blazing performance that surpasses most SCSI drives by a long shot, and even rivaling my 2X 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor RAID0 setup!
Features:
- Rotational Speed: 7200RPM
- Buffer Size: 8MB
- Buffer to disk: 602.0 Mbits/s (Max)
- Read Seek Time (Average): 8.9ms
- 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)
- 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: 120,034 MB
- Number of Platters: 3
- User Sectors Per Drive: 234,441,648
- Servo Type: Embedded
On the outside, the WD1200JB looks pretty much like any other Western Digital hard drive.
But upon closer inspection, we can see the "JB" denomination which means we have a "Special Edition Caviar" drive!
I have to say that this drive is, without a doubt, the fastest single hard drive I have ever tested. With 120GB capacity, it is also the largest single hard drive tested here at PCExtreme.net to date. Since the drive spins at 7200PRM, it is already 50% faster than any 5400RPM drive. But what really gives this "Special Edition" Caviar its edge is the whopping 8 megabyte cache buffer that it has onboard.
The speed difference is quite frankly astounding. If I didn't know better, I would think that it was a RAID array running in RAID 0. In fact, I decided to benchmark it against my RAID setup and here are the results:
RAID array: Two Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM - RAID 0.
Western Digital WD1200JB Special Edition Caviar - Single drive.
Conclusion:
WOW! This is one fast drive! Even though the RAID array beat the WD1200JB in buffered and sequential read times, the single WD1200JB actually beat the RAID setup in almost every other category!
Bufferer write - 14MB/s faster. Random read - 3MB/s faster. Random write - 5MB/s faster. Access time - 5ms faster.
If you are looking for the fastest IDE hard drive anywhere, this is it. And it can be had for under $200USD!
Rating:
PCExtreme gives the Western Digital WD1200JB the highest rating possible: 5X's!
For more information, see:
Western Digital
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