The mother of all hard drives

Author's Rating:

Pros: MASSIVE space, incredible speed, easy install, guaranteed compatibility

Cons: requires one free PCI slot

The Bottom Line: 
Monster sized space, hyper speed, and Western Digital quality and easy installation, you CANNOT LOSE with this drive!

Author's Review
This is the second time I've bought a Western Digital hard drive, and they continue to let me know that they are the top manufacturer of hard drives. I like to think of Western Digital as the Microsoft of storage.

***Opening the box:
I purchased the Western Digital 3.5" IDE Ultra ATA drive, which has 200 Gigs of space, and 8MB cache, and 7200 RPM speed. Upon opening the box, you'll see the well done installation poster, with big diagrams and extremely helpful tips for installing your hard drive. These directions cover every possible installation scenario you can imagine - slave, primary, secondary, Windows 98, 2000, XP, Mac -- nobody is left out in the cold with these directions.

An important thing to note about this drive is that it is over 130 Gigs - which requires a special hardware device to be inserted in order for the computer to recognize it. This will require you to have one open PCI slot (PCI slots on the inside of your computer hold such cards as your graphics and sound cards, USB 2.0 slot cards, or your cable modem or dial up modem card).

An Ultra ATA controller card comes with this hard drive (it came free inside the box, retail is $50), which plugs into a free PCI slot in the computer. Your PCI cable (the long, flat gray cable) plugs from your hard drive into this card, rather than the usual slot that's directly on the motherboard. All of this took a little more than a minute to do.

***The Installation:
Be sure that your jumper is in correctly, or the hard drive will not be recognized for its full storage potential, I made this mistake in the past, by accident. A jumper is a small, square shaped plug that fits into the pins behind the hard drive. Depending on what you're using your hard drive for (e.g., your main C:, or a second hard drive, known as a slave), you have to fit this jumper in to a certain position as indicated on the installation poster that comes with this manual...it's easy.

I bought this hard drive to replace my existing C:, plus, I already have an additional second hard drive, which is an 80 Gig Western Digital 7200 RPM. I set the drives up exactly as the directions told me to. Then, I put my Windows startup disk in (BE SURE THAT YOU HAVE ALL FOUR WINDOWS STARTUP DISKS READY if you're installing this as your drive that will run Windows!), then, during installation, when prompted if I would like to add an additional SCSI or similar adapter, I chose yes, then inserted the driver disk that came with the hard drive, and before I knew it, my "new" computer was up and running.

***The Difference
This new drive replaced my old 40 Gig, 5200 RPM Seagate Barracuda hard drive. The speed and overall performance of my computer, after the installation of this 200 Gig WD drive, is astoundingly fast!! Also, I was very surprised at something that is missing - that annoying "crunch" sound that hard drives make - these new Western Digitals are completely silent!

I'm more than happy to know that I now have the best hard drive on the market that will last me for many, many years, and for this price, it was beyond worth it (when will you ever use 200 Gigs?!). Also, just think about all of the virtual memory that I now have allocated! I will be doing alot of video editing, however, I save my work onto DVDs and CDs, and never to my hard drive, in case of a hack or virus. However, I will have many programs loaded onto it, and after doing so, the computer never slowed down, even with my anti-virus and firewall software.

I've noticed a performance boost when starting up the computer, and Windows no longer takes forever to begin after the splash screen. All of my apps open up in seconds! I'm very impressed with the speed of this drive.

Buying this hard drive was probably the best decision I've made in a long time!