WD Caviar Blue WD800JD 80 GB > Reviews > Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80 GB

Author's product rating:   

Memory / capacity	Excellent
Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Speed	Fast
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Reliable, cheap
Disadvantages:	Can't think of any

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

What is there to really say about hard disc drives? Well that depends on your audience I suspect.

Oh yes, yes it does.

If I were talking to a bunch of tech-heads (bless our geeky hearts), I would say this;

This is a standard SATAII device that displays speeds of;
23.7Mb/s = sequential read
56.8Mb/s = sequential write

And they would know just what I meant.

I think however that some people may want a little more as as such I'm going to explain a lot in the coming paragraphs about connectors and bits a pieces and installation etc.

So, this device is a SATAII hard disc drive. This means that it has a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 300Mb/s and is used for storing data, it also means that it is incompatible with IDE systems and will only work on newer SATA capable systems since it is SATAII. However fear not for there are settings on the back that allow the device to slow down to SATAI speeds. So if your using a SATA system and your thinking maybe you will upgrade to SATAII in the future this would work for you.

Western digital are great company, I always buy my hard drives from them because I have never had one fail on me. This particular device is an 80Gb derivative and will contain a maximum of 74Gb of data when formatted using NTFS. When a drive is made it is not formatted. The idea of formatting is to allow your computer to know where it has stored its data on the device. As such a large table is made which compares the location on the hard drive to the data stored there this takes up about 8% of your overall space. NTFS is just a file system standard and doesn't need to mean much to most people.

I have shown the sequential read/write speeds of the device above, these are reasonable for a device of this type and given the cost of the device (£30) its good. Overall this device is a good size and performance for a good price

The installation of this device is simple as will all hard drives but has one vital difference from normal SATA hard drives. It can use the cunning Western Digital Secure connect cable. This means that the device will be more securely attached to its data cable which is important because SATA data cables have an annoying habit of falling out due to device vibration.

I would recommend this product to anyone who wants this amount of space, but then again if you want more space hard drives are very cheap at the moment so you may want to consider something bigger.