Western Digital Caviar 4Gb review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 1 Aug 1997

Price when reviewed: (£235)

Reviewed By: - Riyad Emeran

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Western Digital has always made reliable hard disks.

In fact I'm still using a 200Mb drive from WD that I've had for over five years. Unfortunately, although the drives are reliable, they have never been particularly fast and the AC34000 is no exception, coming last overall with a benchmark score of 171 overall. That's over 20% behind the winning Maxtor drive.

The main reason for the WD's lacklustre performance is its rotational speed. While every other drive in the test has a spindle speed of 5,400rpm, the WD only spins at 5,200rpm. This means that the average latency is 5.8ms, much higher than all the other drives on test. To make up for this, Western Digital has installed a 256K buffer in the drive, but it's painfully obvious that even this cannot compensate for the slow spin rate.

The AC34000 can't make up for its poor performance by offering great value either. At £211 it is only £34 less than the IBM DeskStar which provides 300Mb more storage and monumentally better performance. Even more telling is that you can buy a 4Gb version of the Maxtor Diamond Max drive for only £209, proving that Western Digital may well have priced themselves out of the market.

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