Okay boys, I'm gonna subject y'all to my latest geek adventure.
Just got my 18G WDC/IBM Expert. Now, y'all know I'm kinda down on WDC as a stock. But guess what, of the 7200rpm IDE drives, WDC is the cheapest. (think these two issues are related???)
But anyway, as I attempted to take out and put in drives into the little drive carriage inside my system, I realize just how much shock these things are subjected to. I had to jam the darn thing in real good; it's pretty tight even without the screws. I now realize shock protection is no trivial issue. It didn't help matters that I was slightly tipsy at the time of installation.
Anyway, performance-wise, it feels a bit more sprightly than my old Maxtor 6.4G drive (2.1G/plate). However, replicating the data from one drive to another took an unusually long time. I'm wondering if there was some interface collisions. There is a difference loading apps, though. The drive runs warm, but it's not uncomfortable to leave your hand on it. In fact, heat's pretty much the same as the Maxtor. Idle spinning is a tad louder, seeks are noticeably louder, but still not a big deal.
Bottom line: A relatively modest performance increase despite more than double the areal density, four times the cache and 33% more spin speed. And I have no idea what I'm gonna do with all that capacity, although I'll probably eventually load up Win98, Win2000, and Linux (does anybody know if you can set up a Linux partition if your boot partition is FAT32?) just for kicks. I'm sure if I benchmark this sucker, it'll blow the old drive out of the water. But real-world, another incremental bit of evidence that those e-machines are plenty powerful for all but true connoisseurs. (make sure to upgrade the RAM, though!) |
