Western Digital JD SATA drives

[mangyDOG]

Has anyone used the new WD JD SATA drives? Or seen a good review? I am thinking of getting a couple for myself but after my experience with a Seagate SATA drive I bought at the start of the year I am going to look before I leap... :wink:

If I do get them I will be using them on the integrated SATA controller on the ASUS A7V8X (Promise chipset)

 

[Clocker]

I haven't tried any SATA drives yet mD. I think you will have better luck with that Promise controller rather than the others though. At least BIOS and driver updates will probably be more readily available. I wish you the best with it though. I'm staying in the sidelines with my SCSI stuff until the SATA stuff matures a little more. I think they will be adding command queuing soon which will make them more attractive to me...

Good luck,
C

 

[blakerwry]

I haven't tried any SATA drives yet mD. I think you will have better luck with that Promise controller rather than the others though. At least BIOS and driver updates will probably be more readily available. I wish you the best with it though. I'm staying in the sidelines with my SCSI stuff until the SATA stuff matures a little more. I think they will be adding command queuing soon which will make them more attractive to me...

Good luck,
C

I'd agree with you Clocker. I think intel probably has the best affordable S-ATA controller available right now.. too bad you can only get it included with their southbridge... I'm not sure whther SI or promise has the next best.. overall, I think drivers need to mature alot, as does firmware.

 

[Jan Kivar]

I haven't tried any SATA drives yet mD. I think you will have better luck with that Promise controller rather than the others though. At least BIOS and driver updates will probably be more readily available.

You can't use Promise's drivers/BIOSs with an integrated RAID controller. I think that applies to SATA controllers as well. The BIOS of the integrated controllers is embedded in the motherboard's BIOS, so You must flash both at the same time. You can use Promise's drivers, but You have to flash the BIOS with hacked one (at least with 20276 RAID chip I use).

Maybe this doesn't apply anymore?

Cheers,

Jan

 

[Explorer]

...I think they will be adding command queuing soon which will make them more attractive to me...

Tagged Command Queuing has been available on all Seagate SATA drives since day one (that would be 2002).

Seagate SATA drives also have a totally native SATA drive interface, meaning they aren't using a performance-robbing serial-to-parallel bridge circuit on an "old" parallel drive interface. The presence of a bridge circuit also increases the price of the hard drive.

 

[CougTek]

The presence of a bridge circuit also increases the price of the hard drive.

Someone should tell it to Seagate's marketing folks. With the awful price premium they charge for the SATA version of their drives, one would guess the engineering department didn't transmit the info to the marketing dudes.

 

[e_dawg]

I don't know what it is about sATA drives, but I have heard a surprising amount of problems with them from installation woes to poor performance.

 

[Explorer]

...Someone should tell it to Seagate's marketing folks. With the awful price premium they charge for the SATA version of their drives, one would guess the engineering department didn't transmit the info to the marketing dudes.

There is around a $20 premium partially because the SATA drive has an 8 MB cache versus 2 MB for the PATA version. WD has similar upcharges between its 2 MB and 8 MB PATA drives.

Once the factories ramp up SATA drive production, the price of the SATA drive interface will be the same or slightly cheaper than a PATA -- not mentioning the inevitable change to electronic circuitry based on 110 micron or 90 micron manufacturing processes.


I've not heard of any particular difficulties with SATA installations.

 

[CougTek]

There is around a $20 premium partially because the SATA drive has an 8 MB cache versus 2 MB for the PATA version. WD has similar upcharges between its 2 MB and 8 MB PATA drives.

I don't follow much the pricing of >120GB HDD, but Western's drives from 40GB to 120GB show only a 5$ or 10$ max. premium for the Special Edition models. Besides, Western has one more reason than Seagate to charge more for their 8MB models - the three warranty that comes with them. Seagate offers no longer warranty, so IMO their 20$ premium is just another way to get more from the customer than they should. There's no way a simple cache increase worth 20$ if the competitor can do it for half less and still fit in a three times longer warranty.

 

[e_dawg]

I have also noticed that quite a few places are still charging $30-40 USD more for an sATA version depending on the model, which is ridiculous.

 

[Buck]

Interestingly, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 with 8MB of cache and native SATA does not perform equal to or better then the PATA WD2500JB.

 

[mangyDOG]

The promise controller on the motherboard works just fine and I haven't had any problems with using the Seagate drive other than it is really really slow. My old WD400BB drive kicks its butt and my WD600JB drive leaves it for dead. This is why I need info on the new WD-JD drives, as far as I can tell they are a SATA version of the PATA JB drives. But before I buy one I want a warm fuzzy feeling that I am getting a fast drive! So if you know someone who runs Storage Review, please get them to run their range of tests.... :wink:

 

[CougTek]

So if you know someone who runs Storage Review, please get them to run their range of tests...

Everyone here knows and is known by Eugene and has pm/e-mail/chat with him at one time or another. None of us can push him to review a particular drive.

 

[iGary]

I don't know what it is about sATA drives, but I have heard a surprising amount of problems with them from installation woes to poor performance.

I've built a few simple desktop workstations so far and a server using a RAID built with Seagate SATA drives and have not experienced a single problem -- and the performance has been excellent.


http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/865/P4SPA+.htm

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,587,00.html

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,585,00.html

http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/E7501/X5DPA-GG.htm

http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata.asp (actually, not the new Model 8506, but the "older" Model 8500-8)