Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD400BBRTL 40 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I had a 20-Gig, IBM drive on my 3-year-old P-2, W98 system and upgraded to the Western Digital 40-Gig not so much for the increased storage but for the 7200 rpm spin speed, hoping for a performance improvement. It indeed improved. The first and most noticable was when my desktop (cluttered, LOTS of icons plus Office toolbar) came up MUCH more quickly than before. Plus, the drive is VERY quiet - cannot hear it clicking away like my former. I replaced my current drive 0 with this unit and the supplied software made the disk-to-disk transfer very easy (although it took almost 4 hours for the copy.) The software even detected and FIXED the fact that my BIOS wouldn't recognize a drive of greated than 32 Gig. The only problem I had was not being able to boot after doing the copy and replacing my old drive. Tech Support got to me within 2 minutes and supplied a remedy (jumper settings) within 5 minutes.

Conclusion

Packing just two platters, the WD400BB is indeed a quiet and cool design. Active cooling should be unnecessary in most cases. Even when seeking, the drive is quiet. Though not as silent as units from Fujitsu or Samsung, the drive is nonetheless quieter than recent units from Maxtor, themselves not exactly roaring disks.

The 400BB's WinMark scores shatter previous records... they stand in a class of their own. IOMeter scores, though not staggering, represent improvement over previous models (and some of the competition, for that matter). When combined with quiet and cool operation, such performance makes WD's unit a viable alternative to the Quantum Fireball LM (fast but noisy) and, depending on final pricing, the Deskstar 75GXP (fast but relatively pricey). Those looking for a drive smaller than 40 gigs should consider it.

Its a GREAT harddrive on its own, but the price really .... I could have bought a 100GB hard drive for less, but amazon.com always gave me the packge, so i bought it here. Its quiet, not like it matters, now my computer lods almost 3 times as fast. And the size is nice and comfy. Should last about 6yrs if you dont try to save space, if ya do well...... A long time..... The 7200rpm makes it NICE! However, the biggest drawback was installing it. Getting it hooked up was easy. I just copied EVERYTHING on my old 10GB hard drive, to the new 40GB hard drive, and it took about an hour, well just do it in the morning, and when your home from work, it should be done ;)

I have 4 operating systems on this hard drive. I haven't had any problems using Win98/2k/xp, Red Hat Linux. The one thing to note that the version that I needed required a firmware update to get it to work correctly with Linux which you can download at the Western Digital Website.

For those who do Software mirroring and stripping implementations. I can verify that it works under Windows 2k and xp.

Western Digital (WD) drives have never let me down. Granted, it all depends on the use and environment you install this piece of media - and some prefer Maxtor or Seagate. In the EIDE world of drives, my choice is WD. It's incredibly quiet, very fast (especially when you connect it to an ATA/100 card on a PCI slot -- hot dang!), and allows you a quick solution for increased storage. I used this exact drive to reincarnate an old Pentium class I machine into a nice little file server on my home LAN. With a 100mb PCI network card, it almost competes with a low end Dell server.

It's out there, and I'm lovin' every minute of it!

This item is cheaper through Western Digital directly.

This is the first time I ever bought and installed a hard drive and it was very easy. So far, I am very happy.

This harddrive is pretty good. It does the work it suppose to and it's a lot quieter than the last generation. It's very fast cause the 7200rpm and ATA/100. I recommand that if you don't want the top of the line but still a decent one. This is a good choice.

Quieter than maxtor's 40GB hard drive. The install is a cinch. So go ahead, buy it already!

The Western Digital's 7,200 rpm hard drive runs fast but yet is so quite sometimes I not sure it is even running.The only problem I had installing it is that my mother board is an older model.But with western digitals help was able to download new bios and flash the old one so it was able to understand the Ultra ATA/100 and Ultra ATA/66 interfaces.I consider it very good buy from a good company