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.

I suggest you to check out my other guides on: tips for disk recovery and camcorders hard drive

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.

Please check out my other guides on: disk recovery guide and Xbox hard drive

Buffalo Technology LS-CH1.0TL LinkStation Live 1TB

External Hard Drive

By Andreas Lee

1TB external hard drive

LinkStation Live II is 1TB external hard drive that suits home and small business environments as shared network storage. You can use it as a storage center in your house to share files between computers in the same network.

Besides, this simple NAS system can stream multimedia to a Macintosh, PC, DLNA media players, and from iTunes software you are allowed to access music files.

As 1TB external hard drive, LinkStation Live can also be a dependable server, easy to install, and works very quiet. With LinkStation Live LS-CHL, you can share your photos, videos, music smoothly. For added security and ultimate protection, password protected features are provided and you can backup previous files automatically by using Memeo auto backup.

LinkStation Live 1TB external hard drive is very user friendly to make sharing extremely simple, increasing capacity by adding a DriveStation, sharing a printer with family members. By using built-in Web Access feature you can also access files share multimedia collection via web browser anywhere, and share/store/stream multimedia content over your network to your TV or HDTV.

Pros

Web Access enables to share your files so easily with anyone through internet. If you want your friend knows about your file documents or other files, just give them a link (URL) which establish a direct connection between your LinkStation 1TB external hard drive and their computer so friend can access your files easily.

Cons

LinkStation Live is wasting energy while using Web Access since it must be ON all the time. In auto power mode, you can not access it through web browser due to inactive.

Specs

• Hard disk size : 1 TB
• Rotation speed : 7200 RPM
• Interface type : SATA-150
• Model : LS-CH1.0TL
• Manufacturer : Buffalo technology
• OSes requirements : Windows XP/2000/Vista/Server 2003/Server 2008 and MacOS X 10.3.9 or later
• Warranty : 1 year warranty

Compare prices on:

• Amazon
• J&R

I wrote another guide you might be interested in reading: disk recovery and hard disk drives