Western Digital 45 GByte Hard Drive – THG.RU

Introduction

Five weeks ago, we took a look at six IDE hard drives between 15 and 30 GBytes. But working at 7,200 rpm, those drives target the high end IDE market, which means excellent performance and a higher noise level than with 5,400 rpm models. We got the latest high capacity drive from Western Digital, offering 45 GBytes at the standard revolution speed of 5,400. That makes it suitable for home or office computers with huge capacity requirements.

Technical specs

More detailed informations are available at the Western Digital homepage.

Vibrations, noise level

Thanks to only 5,400 rpm, the WD drive neither makes bothering noises, nor does it generate noticeable vibrations. Usually, your power supply fan will be louder than this drive, so you should only hear the read or write accesses (the heads’ movements). The lately review drives 153BA and 205BA have also been real gentlemen, running at a low vibration level in spite of their high rotation speed. Of course this also applies to the 45 GByte model, which calls even less attention thanks to the low rotation speed.

Temperature

High rotation speeds cause higher friction, thus also more heat than models running at 5,400 rpm. As a consequence, the 450AA is able to score lots of points in this discipline, as we measured 37єC (99єF) max. The drives of our first hard drive review heated up to between 39єC (102єF) (Western Digital as well) and 50єC (122єF) (Seagate). All temperature measurements are done at approximately 20єC (68єF) and outside the computer case, but even after installation into a computer case this drive will certainly never reach critical temperatures (60єC/140єF and more).

CPU Load

The WD drive doesn’t look as good here, if you compared to the previously tested hard drives. It scored a CPU load of 46%, which is worse than the scores of the majority of its competitors.

Drive Configuration

Western Digital differentiates between single drive and master mode. Single drive has to be used if your hard disk is the only drive at the IDE port. Before attaching two drives to this IDE port, you will have to decide which one will be master or slave.

The photo shows the Caviar 450AA from the downside. We have enlarged the interesting area:

The jumpers have to be placed vertically from the right side.

Performance: Data Transfer Speed

Here you can see how the WD drives compares to the candidates of our last review. The red lines represent the maximum transfer speed (outer medium), while the blue ones show the minimum transfer speed (end of medium). At first, the score of 25.4 MBytes/s seemed to be quite high for a 5400 RPM drive, if you look at the two other WD drives working at 7,200 rpm. However, this phenomenon can easily be explained: Thanks to the high data density, more bits can be read in one pass, which compensates the slower rotation speeds.

You can also see that the transfer speeds are clearly less than the bandwidth of UltraDMA/66 (66 MBytes/s), which is a common appearance. Only the drives’ cache memory is able to provide those high transfer rates today.

For future tests I will use HD Tach 2.61 instead of ZD’s WinBench (see graph) because it provides the same result in much shorter time. Additionally it also tests the write performance.

Performance: Access Time

As expected, the WD drive cannot work wonders, as the slow rotation speed also has an impact on access time. Nevertheless, the result is still satisfactory. Please note that this number (in milliseconds) includes seek and positioning time. In addition, the drive usually has to wait some instants, before the requested data passes under the read heads.

Performance: Content Creation Winstone 2000

In spite of its low rotational speed, the 450AA is still able to get a better result than our soon-to-be-replaced reference drive, the Seagate ST320430A, which is working at 7,200 rpm. That is obviously due to the large cache memory on the Western Digital drive. It comes with 2 MBytes, whereas the Seagate has to live with 512 Kbyte only.

Conclusion

Looking at pricewatch.com, you can find this WD drive for less than $200. That’s a really good price for a good hard drive. Western Digital is not offering absolute high end capacity drives for some time now. Here, Maxtor and IBM are outplaying each other (80 and 75 GBytes). WD rather tries to offer products with the best price/performance ratio. If you just need a rather large hard drive without having special demands, you will get a timely model which is easy to handle.

With a net price of approximately 0.4 cents per megabyte, the 450AA is able to position itself at the very price/performance top. In comparison to other 5,400-drives, its performance is also at a very good level. Additionally, you won’t get heat or vibration problems.