Western Digital is hardly a new comer in the mass storage arena. My first add-in hard drive was a Western Digital 340 megabyte drive from more than ten years ago that astoundingly still works. Since then, I have used countless drives from a variety of manufacturers, but have never come across any to be as reliable as WD. Hard disk capacities have made leaps and bounds since the humble beginnings of that 340 meg classic, and today we have EIDE drives featuring 40 gigabytes per platter available up to 160 gigabytes.
Until recently, if you wanted the fastest EIDE drive on the market, IBM’s Deskstar 60GXP series were the drives to get. Not content with their Caviar series of EIDE drives taking second place, Western Digital decided to take the speed crown by introducing the first ever EIDE drive to feature an 8 megabyte buffer, the 100 gigabyte WD 1000JB “Special Edition.” It is an enhanced version of their regular Caviar series 1000BB. The “JB” model features the 8meg buffer, up from 2megs on the standard drive. Here are the factory specs:
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Interface: Ultra ATA/100
Average Read Seek Time: 8.9 ms
Write Seek Time (Average) 10.9 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average)
Average Latency 4.2 ms (nominal)
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100.0 MB/s
Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s
Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s
Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s
Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s
Buffer To Disk 525.0 Mbits/s (Max)
Buffer Size 8 MB
You will notice that the drive still has the standard 7200 rpm spindle speed for EIDE drives. It’s the extra larger buffer that gives the drive its incredible speed. Another factor is that the drive only has an ATA-100 interface. So far Maxtor is the only drive manufacturer to use the new ATA-133 interface, the rest of the hdd manufacturers are waiting on Serial ATA.
