Western Digital WD400BB
The WD400BB is a 40GB hard disk drive that has a rotational speed of 7200RPM. It's priced at only $385 and its cost per GB is $9.62--slightly more than the other 7200RPM hard disk, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60. But then again, the Maxtor is much larger than the WD400BB and you can generally expect the cost per GB to come down with larger drives.
The WD400BB has a seek time of 8.9ms. This is slightly slower than the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60. They both have 2MB buffer sizes and the only difference between the two on paper is the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 has an extra disk and two additional heads to read the two extra surfaces.
The WD400BB was easily the fastest IDE drive that we tested. It beat all the other IDE drives in WinBench Business Disk and High-End Disk. It even had the fastest access time out of all the IDE drives. The one area that it did lose out was in the CPU test, its score was a little high but this should not deter you from this drive.
The transfer graphs were very interesting for this drive. The WD400BB maintained some high transfer rates but the graphs were not very smooth. It seems that this drive would have been calibrating its heads more than most which would have made the transfers hiccup a lot of the time. This may have affected its scores in many of the other tests but it still remained one of the fastest drives on the block.
Company:Western Digital
Price:AU$315
Distributor:Achieva Technology Australia
Phone:02 9742 3288
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