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.