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Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB Hard Drive |
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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
Which is what you see above. The premise here is to use both the SATA data and SATA power connectors as well as two insets on either side of them as a means of securely connecting the drive. The sacrifice of the SATA power connector in this case results in unmatched durability as you would literally have to break the drive in half to remove this cable. However, when equipping the SecureConnect, you must use a 4-pin molex to power the drive. Given that the 7500AAKS doesn't have one, it's a catch-22.
And that's why you'll have to use the typical duo of SATA power and SATA data cables. These are easily obtainable as every new motherboard ships with a pair and I'm told the legacy free Western Digital drives will as well.
The included CD - Data Lifeguard Tools - is unnecessary for a tech savvy user, but could prove useful for someone relatively unfamiliar with computers looking to get their hands wet. Upon insertion you are presented with several options, including software installation, boot disk creation, registration, a user manual, and some Google software which apparently comes bundled with everything.
Once you install the software and run it, you're presented with several options. Things like setting up your hard drive, dividing it into partitions, formatting partitions, drive-to-drive file copies, and some advanced drive information. All of this can be done manually using various other methods, but for the typical user it could come in handy. Without further adieu, here's the test system used for benchmarking:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8GHz Processor
- Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (rev 1.3) Motherboard
- 2x 1GB G.Skill DDR2 800 RAM
- eVGA GeForce 7900 GS PCI-E Video Card
- DVD-ROM
- 550 Watt Power Supply
To start things off I decided to do some real world performance testing. First, I timed a small multiple file copy - 1.03GB (984 files in 14 folders). I then timed a large single file copy - a 1.03GB zip file. 1GB is treated as 1024MB, so 1.03GB is about 1055MB. Then I ran HD Tach's 8MB zones test along with SiSoftware's Sandra XI Pro Business (SP4) File System and Physical Disks benchmarks. The results are as follows.
Multiple small file copy (1.03GB, 984 files in 14 folders) - :39 (27MB/s)
Single large file copy (1.03GB) - :35 (30.1MB/s)
This seemed a bit low to me (even though write speeds are usually lower than read or burst speeds) so I decided to retest it with twice as much data.
Multiple small file copy (2.06GB, 1968 files in 28 folders) - 1:26 (24.5MB/s)
Double large file copy (2.06GB, 2 files) - 1:05 (32.5MB/s)
Interestingly enough, as small files increase in number (and therefore size), the transfer rate slightly drops. Conversely, as larger files get copied, the transfer rate slightly increases. I also decided to time Windows XP startup. This was from the moment the loading screen came up to the moment the desktop first appeared (time before that varies by motherboard and time after that varies by how many programs you have set to launch on startup).
Windows XP Boot Time - 25 seconds
Not bad at all. Let's see what Sandra said.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 August 2007 )
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