Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
I can’t get away from it; I am just a sucker for storage. I try to keep myself away from the HDD scene because I know I will just buy everything I can afford to buy. Hard drives and Chassis are my weakness, and today Western Digital is going to smack me up with some big fat storage. WD impressed me with their WD2500KS drives and now they are back to try to win me over with their high capacity solution. Enter the WD5000KS.
This drive sports the same specifications as its smaller sibling except for the storage capacity. This unit delivers a capacity of 500GB’s spinning at 7200 RPM’s. The drive delivers what seems to be an industry standard of 16MB cache and trots along with an 8.9 ms read seek time and 10.0 ms write seek times. All of this 500GB goodness is transferred through the SATA interface at 300 MB/s. Oh, by the way, they gave us back our NCQ.
Packaged in the box with this onion, remember that onions have layers, is the standard stuff from WD. They give you a manual, a bunch of screws, the Data Lifeguard tools, and the SecureConnect cable. The SecureConnect cable takes the place of the standard SATA cable and power connector and provides added strength against the accidental disconnect. With the SATA II standard, the SATA cables have had an overhaul though making less need for this SecureConnect cable. It is still nice to have though.
The WD5000KS lives under the Western Digital “Cool n’ Quiet” roof and actually lives up to these claims somewhat better than I had expected. Under conditions here in the lab, this drive is in open air. It does not receive any cooling from case fans and because of that, it is usually very easy to hear the drive during testing however, this drive remained nearly inaudible throughout testing.
Cool n’ Quiet in full effect here. Granted the drive is a bit hotter than the other drives probed, it is still within comfortable limits. Also note that these drives were probed during benchmarking. This drive will report lower temps when seated properly in your chassis behind some decent cooling so you can rest assured you need no fancy shmancy cooling giddup’to keep this sucker chugging. Yeah, I said “fancy shmancy”, and it was fun too!
