The Best of Western Digital Drives

By Andreas Lee

Western Digital drives

Earlier, digital data storages are not simple machines but big mainframes that take half of your office space, work very slowly, and have low capacity. That era was over, and it is changed to small sized hard drives which have impressive performance and ultra capacity sized.

Recently, hard drives’ size has become one of most searched innovations in hard drive market. The best example in this small sized digital storages period is Western Digital drives that come in reliable form and large capacity.

Western Digital drives face the market challenge for big size hard drives’ capacity with high quality performance. In other words, Western Digital has created a distinctive culture in purchasing internal hard drives.

In early 2003, Western Digital Raptor (often marketed as WD Raptor) has become a part of Western Digital drives. This WD360GD raptor series is the first incarnation of raptor series satisfying the gamers with its unbelievable 10 000 RPM spindle speed run on one platter and has 16 MB buffer size with 36 GB storage capacity. WD360GD is the first ATA drive which operates at 10 000 spindle speed.

These internal Western Digital drives were synonymous with first class performance.

One year after that, Western Digital released the new brother of Raptor series, WD740GD that gave more space for users with 74 GB, quieter than the first generation, and had 2 platters.

Last year in April 2008, Western Digital created the fourth generation of Western Digital raptor series namely WD VelociRaptor WD3000. These internal Western Digital drives still have a same spindle speed and buffer size, the difference is only on their capacity. The newest Raptor has 300 GB storage.

WD VelociRaptor provides a constant performance same as its predecessor even if it contained hundred gigabytes of data. It offers fast data access, sustained data transfer rates, and IOPS. Moreover, the temperature and noise level of Western Digital drives kept down.

All of these features are not enough for Western Digital. The physical size of internal Western Digital drives managed to be kept as small as possible. Because of their size, they don’t look like common desktop drive but more similar to a laptop drive.

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How To Configure Jumper Setting And Install An IDE Hard Drive

By Andreas Lee

Hard drive is a very complicated hardware in a computer. Firstly, you must know exactly either you want to attach it as Master or Slave when you want to install an IDE hard drive. Set it to Master if you want to load Operating System (Windows, Macintosh, Linux, etc.) from it.

ide hard drive

In another case, if you already have an IDE hard drive as Master and install a new one just for an additional storage, then set the new IDE hard drive to Slave. Jumper is required to be moved on the back of IDE hard drive each time this setting changed.

Most people think this is hard to do because they don’t know how to do it. Practically, changing an IDE hard drive’ jumper setting is very simple. You can find jumper configuration on the back of IDE hard drive which has a small label about jumper setting. Please check the label how to set to Master and Slave.

After it is done, take a look on IDE cable which connects primary hard drive with motherboard, usually IDE cable’s color is grey and has unused second connector. If you set your new IDE hard drive as Slave, connect the second connector to it. In other case if you put the new IDE drive in as Master, you need to detach IDE cable running on your old hard drive and connect it to the new drive.

In both cases whether as Slave or Master, power cable is needed to connect on the back of new IDE hard drive to supply power. Therefore, your CPU must have at least one unused power cable.

ide hard drive jumper setting

Make sure the new IDE drive is fastened tightly on both sides of its slot. This is very important, because not well fastened hard drive can lead to files corruption.

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A Guide to Prevent Internal Drives Failure

By Andreas Lee

internal drives

Many parts compose a computer. One of the parts is the heart of computer, internal hard drive. All commands come from it to let computer knows what the user exactly wants to do.

All of information, even the most detailed can be remembered by internal drives. It knows exactly when you write and save a document, when you use certain applications and read email. A computer needs a mediator to convey information from internal hard drive to user, it is known as Operating System which is the main program that sends and receives commands between user and internal hard drive.

Through moving platters, internal drives encode digital information by using read/write head. Each platter stores information in the different parts. By detecting magnetization of platters’ material, the read/write head search for files that you are looking for.

You really give your internal drives hard task if you play games, watch high definition videos, use graphic and multimedia programs, etc. Those kind of applications require a real operation and that will make internal drives prone to physical issues.

In some cases like this, hard drive recovery is required since backup software can not help you to solve this problem, and hard drive recovery service which is the only way out charges you with very expensive fee, so do not give your internal drives more pressure by using many programs that require a lot of memory usage.

Internal drives are getting larger in terms of capacity, rotation speed, cache size, and transfer rate but getting smaller in their size. Those specifications make them able to receive more pressure from memory-hunger applications. These internal drives abilities reduce fault-tolerance level so take a closer look on specifications when you choose to buy an internal hard drive, make sure its specifications match your needs.

Other unexpected causes can bring serious trouble to your internal hard drive such as short circuit, physical shocks or even poor manufacturing. Therefore, make sure you buy a guaranteed product.

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