Got my Western Digital 640GB AALS (Black)

my previous maxtor 500GB HD was so slow.........with this AALS my vista boot time / shutdown is about 3x faster and everything defiantly loads faster. can't hear it over my case fans (AAM off).

(i original got 2 but one came with a dent on it and was corrupted -_-)





thats with vista and 250gb of shit installed do the scores look right? seems low

Nah, your numbers look fine especially if the drive is the same one that has your os on it. Remember that while you're running these benchmarks Windows is also doing it's own thing in the background which includes playing with the swapfile which would also be on that single drive.

where did you get the HD from?

I can't find that single-platter drive anywhere.

Newegg doesn't show recent model revisions.

Thanks!

Single platter ? There is no single platter 640GB HDD. Each and every 640GB drive have 2 platters.

faugusztin said:

Single platter ? There is no single platter 640GB HDD. Each and every 640GB drive have 2 platters.

Click to expand...

Correct. There are some 500GB/platter drives, but only Seagate ships them at 7200RPM. WD and Samsung have them in their reduced spindle speed models. Samsung admits to 5400RPM, WD is much more coy about the spindle speed on their Caviar Green drives.

"This above will soon be obsolete"

BTW, the OP's HDTach screenshot does look about right for the drive. Looks like WD has given some of the newer Caviar Black drives a serious kick in the pants on seek performance. Back in the day when WD specified seek time, it was routinely 8.9ms, but this drive comes in at 8ms flat.

Crapola...misread the post.

I thought he meant the ....WD5001AALS-00L3B2...which I thought was a single-platter 500GB, but apparently its not either.

Cliff Couser said:

Crapola...misread the post.

I thought he meant the ....WD5001AALS-00L3B2...which I thought was a single-platter 500GB, but apparently its not either.

Click to expand...

If you want single platter 500GB go with the Seagate 7200.12 500GB drive (ST3500418AS). I used this drive as the OS drive in all of my HTPC's and couldn't be happier with it. Speeds are on par with the WD Black series.

Edit: Please don't turn this into a Seagate firmware roast, that was the 7200.11 series and it's long since been resolved. To my knowledge and experience there have been no problems with the 7200.12 series.