Western Digital WD3200JBRTL Caviar 320 GB EIDE Hard Drive Review
Brand : Western Digital
This purchase replaced a venerable six-year-old 40GB Seagate hard drive that was beginning to misbehave in an HP desktop at my small office, where I am unofficially head of IT. While 40GB seemed like a lot of capacity then, even the most inexpensive drives today have at least double the storage, and this inexpensive Western Digital (WD) drive packs a whopping 320GB, far more than I will need until this computer retires, and I move the drive to its successor.
Since this purchase was for business, low cost was important, but I don't want to lose sleep about reliability. Although other drives have good quality reputations, WD and Seagate have been the most trouble-free in my experience. I prefer the WD Caviar series because they are a good value per GB, run cool, and I have never had one fail.
I needed the drive overnight, and it was unfortunately after the cutoff time for all of the other online retailers my firm usually uses; however, I was able to place the order with Amazon with ten minutes to spare, and despite the express shipping cost of 40%(!) of the unit price, Amazon delivered, as usual.
Western Digital WD3200JBRTL Caviar 320 GB EIDE Hard Drive Feature
- Ultra-quiet, high-performance 320 GB EIDE internal hard drive ideal for desktop and enterprise storage applications
- 7200 RPM spindle speed; 8 MB cache
- 1-year limited warranty
Western Digital WD3200JBRTL Caviar 320 GB EIDE Hard Drive Overview
Cool-running, quiet operation, superior performance and industry-leading reliability make these next-generation WD Caviar Blue drives the perfect hard drives for desktop and enterprise storage. WD, the first to introduce an 8 MB buffer, has advanced the caching algorithms of this new and improved Caviar family of hard drives, resulting in next-generation high performance - performance that matches the speed of most 16 MB cache drives.Heat is a major contributor to hard drive wear, and cool drive operating temperatures help increase long-term drive reliability. WD achieves the lowest operating temperature of any hard drive in it's class, including slower drives spinning at 5, 400 RPM, by lowering the drives' power consumption through advanced design of electronics and firmware.Today's PCs, digital video recorders and gaming machines are increasingly operated in environments where noise is less tolerated. WD minimizes WD Caviar noise to levels virtually below the threshold of human hearing with its WhisperDrive technology, which features a highly efficient power driver design. And to cut seek noise, Soft Seek technology streamlines read/write seeking algorithms, resulting in the drive operating more efficiently when accessing and writing data.
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Customer Reviews
Totally Satisfied - The Oldephart - Clearfield, Utah, USA
I bought this as a gift for my son and to date he's very satisfied with it over all. The 320gigs was perfect for his on-line game playing. I liked the price as well as the prompt delivery. It was exactly what I was looking for.
It's a hard drive... - T. Sherry - Cali
This hd is working just fine... I've had drives fail on me before but this one is working right out of the box.
No guarantees with hd's so always back up your data.
My kind of upgrade - R. S. Vollmer - Boca Raton, FL USA
This is an excellent drive. It is fast, reliable and quiet. And I mean really quiet. I used it to replace a 60gb drive that was annoying my wife because it was continually chug-chugging while she was at the computer. So I took a disk image, swapped in this drive, restored the image to it and was done in less than a half hour. And did I mention that it was really quiet? Well, so's my wife.
Caveat Emptor - D. Youatt - Redmond, WA USA
Bought one of these from J&R Electronics. Their billing and shipping was prompt and accurate.
Came in new, original WDC packaging.
Couldn't get it to work reliably (or at all in some cases) in first computer.
Tried as many combinations/permutations of jumper settings, master, slave, single drive, etc. as were documented in the manual (with corresponding hardware configurations, of course).
All using previously working 40-pin/80-wire cable.
In all cases, with the drive connected, it caused interface timeouts.
Thought it might be just an old motherboard, so tried a new, add-in PATA card. Same behavior.
Tried it in another newer computer. Didn't see the drive and it caused the existing drive to go away.
So... decided to RMA through WDC.
Tried to do the "express", prepaid RMA, but... drive serial number (on the original WDC sticker on the drive) didn't match the model number on the sticker (wd3200aajb) and the automated support thingie wouldn't accept it.
Did a plain, vanilla RMA. WDC's support center received it Friday.
We'll see.
Not impressed so far.
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