X-bit labs

Three External Hard Disk Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity (page 3)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 07/06/2004 | 01:14 PM ]

Western Digital WDXC1200JB

This drive comes from the ComboSE family, something like an elite class in the external HDD series from Western Digital. The device has a case of transparent plastic with special pink-violet highlighting. The face side of the drive has two LEDs, indicators of the operational mode. The rear panel contains two IEEE1394 ports, a USB port and a power connector.

The 120GB HDD is endowed with an 8MB buffer and rotates its spindle at 7200rpm speed. The average seek time is 8.9msec. As you may have noticed, the drive is cosmopolitan in connectivity, attaching across either FireWire or USB 2.0 interfaces. Its dimensions are 44x218x154mm.

The device comes with the following accessories: a short installation manual, a power adapter with cable, a software CD, a USB cable, a FireWire cable.

The average retail price of the WDXC1200JB is $200.

Testbed and Methods

We used two benchmarking tools for our tests: WinBench 99 2.0 and FC Test 1.0.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB;
• RADEON 7000 graphics card, 32MB onboard memory;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.

We connected the drives to the USB 2.0 controller integrated into the ICH5 South Bridge of the i865PE chipset and to a PCI FireWire controller based on the VIA VT6307 chip (for the WDXC1200JB model that alone supports this interface). We ran our tests with the default drivers of the operating system. We formatted the drives in FAT32 and NTFS into one partition with the default cluster size. In some cases, mentioned below, we used 32GB partitions, also created in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size. Before testing, we wrote the Maxtor drive through to avoid the forced write verification implemented in that device.