Friday, December 21, 2012

Western Digital Black 4TB WD4001FAEX Hard Drive:Initial Review


Introduction 

"Houston, we have a problem"



This isn't a complete and final review and the reason being that the drive developed a bad sector just as I had started my benchmarking of it.Without much thought I went through the painless Newegg RMA process and have since shipped the drive off for a replacement.Surprisingly this isn't my fist Black hard drive to have a problem.My first 2tb Caviar Black failed after only months of ownership.However the replacement has been going very strong since.Even with two Black drives being faulty I still stick by the Black line and Western Digital as a whole.I own or have owned over a dozen Western Digital hard drives with only two giving fault and the rest performing admirably in a range of usage scenarios like gaming,video recording and editing,24/7 file serving,and with multiple types of RAID levels involved.Even with my limited time with the drive I was able to gain some sense of it's performance capabilities, how it stacks up with competitors hard drives on the market,and whether it is a viable storage solution.


Monday, December 17, 2012

500gb Western Digital Velociraptor:A $79 Dollar Steal That Packs a Serious Punch


 Introduction


During the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events many great deals were to be had and few matched or exceeded this particular deal which netted me a latest generation 500gb Western Digital Velociraptor for only $79.99 and with free shipping included.This same drive sells for a regular price of $149.99 and shipping costs at Newegg.com.The deal was so good I had to buy it and considering I own several of the 1tb versions of this drive I knew I wasn't making a mistake and wouldn't be disappointed if the 1tb version is an indicator.Today I'm going to test the performance of the 500gb model against it's bigger 1tb sibling and see where it's performance stands.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive Review:Is it king of the hard drive waters?


Introduction


This past Black Friday had tons of storage deals and this 3TB Barracuda might have been the highlight of those storage sales.With prices as low as $89.99 for this particular drive from several online retailers this drive quickly became a must buy item even if it wasn't a necessity such as my purchase of it.I bought this particular drive for $99.99 at Amazon and received it a day later.Now with the drive finally in hand lets see if there is something more than a low price that makes this drive so highly sought after.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB Hard Drive Review.Is it still the king of hard drives or a true dinosaur in this age of technology?



Introduction


Today I have the latest generation Western Digital Velociraptor for review.Western Digital is back again with a updated models of their renowned 2.5 inch,10,000rpm
beast. This specific drive is the WD1000DHTZ; a 1 terabyte capacity drive and the first Velociraptor model to sport such a high capacity.The new raptors are also available in 250gb and 500gb capacities.Every two years or so the Velociraptor gets refreshed not just at a hardware level but at the marketing level as well with this new model.WD is no longer pushing this drive as the ultimate choice for gamers and enthusiasts.This drive is prominently being marketed as a workstation solution.Western Digital states that the drive is ideal for High-performance computing, 3D rendering, digital content creation and editing, scientific computing and image management.Considering the features such as 10,000rpm disc speed,SATA 6gb/s interface,1 terabyte capacity,64mb cache,RAFF,No-Touch ramp loading, pre-emptive wear leveling,and a 5-year warranty.With those features in mind it's apparent this drive was built for serious workloads that are common in professional workstation environments.