Western Digital Caviar 160GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Customer Reviews
Awesome, 12/3/2003
Reviewer: Albert , London, ON
This hard drive has amazing performance and great value. Installation was very easy and the Data Life Guard utilities Western Digital supplies with the hard drive are great maintenance and trouble shooting tools. The hard drive came with an ATA100 controller card, but if your computer already is compatible with ATA100 or higher, don't use it. When I used the card, the hard drive wouldn't boot properly and the BIOS could not configure any of the hard drives attached. But as soon as I connected with the built-in controller it worked amazingly. The 8MB cache buffer is certainly worth the upgrade, commonly used menu's and games run faster. Overall this hard drive offers great thorough performance and huge capacity. Just make sure your BIOS is compatible with hard drives over 137GB.
Installation, 11/24/2003
Reviewer: Nic, Montreal
If you're installing this drive under any version of Windows 98, be sure to setup the drive with Data Lifeguard version 11.0 which is available for download on the Western Digital site. The software that comes in the box is version 10.0 and it will not detect the correct size of the hard drive when installing under Windows 98. A big plus is that you also get an Ultra ATA controller card in the box so that you can take full advantage of what this drive has to offer. The only problem is on this site, they advertise the average seek time being 4.2 ms, whereas the retail box indicates it to be 8.9 ms.