Deals.Woot

I'm in for one. It may not be the fastest drive available, but space and speed make it worth having as an additional drive. The 64 MB cache surprised me and was the biggest selling point for this item. The last time I purchased a drive at near this price, it was half the size of this one.

Please note that these are advanced format drives which means they will not work on WHS, Server 2003 or XP unless you align them first. Also won't work on Tivo. They will work at first, but unless you realign them, they are prone to data loss.

http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/01/31/forum-focus-western-digital-advanced-format-drives-and-windows-home-server/

You data loss shouldn't occur, just poor performance..something around 15%-20%. The upside is that advanced format drives should lose less space to formatting.

I used a couple of these in Linux without being aligned and when @zod000 mentions 15-20%, he means that's what performance you can expect, that's not the penalty. I would say they performed at about 15-20% of what they were capable of (for write speed).

Realigned, reformatted, and they work great! Solid drives, low power, high capacity, and faster than a lot of the other drives around.

Thanks, zod000. I'm using one of these in a Linux based NAS that I'm locating at my son's place for offsite backup. Performance is constrained by network speed (throttled to avoid slurping up all of my son's bandwidth during backups) so drive performance matters little. Data integrity is paramount since it is a backup.

Regrettably, this is another example of a 5400RPM drive where it isn't immediately obvious from reading the specs on the parent site that it is one. I have been seeing a lot of these lately, anyone have any idea why it is suddenly chic to run 5400 RPM drives, not too long ago if you bought a 3.5in hard drive you were almost guaranteed to get a 7200rpm drive, now everything is 5400... its like we are slipping backwards, where are my 10k and 15k desktop class drives ;)

@jyelle: And 242 points behind the WD60000HLHX if we are just comparing random WD drives.... or a better comparison (same basic family) would be with the WD10EALS which is the same family, 7200rpm drive which beats the WD20EARS by 168....

My point stands, yes there are crappy 7200rpm drives but a similar class of drive at a faster RPM will almost always have faster random seek times. It is a better indicator of speed than throwing out the theoretical maximum transfer rate of 3GB/s all the time which none of these drives (except maybe that WD60000HLHX which has a 6gb/s to compensate) comes even close to even in ideal sequential read operations.

The less power thing makes some sense, but it still doesn't seem to answer why almost /all/ the hard drives I see cropping up end up being 5400RPM, seems like the power savings aren't /that/ good.

True I think you save 1w per drive or something similar. I agree that higher speed drives in the same class are going to lead to lower latencies, but I also think the reason that so many of the newer ones are lower RPM is simply because they're "good enough" for most people. I bet 90% of users wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a 5400RPM vs 7200RPM (newer class) drive if you swapped it in without them knowing. The fact that the newer 5400's beat the older 7200s isn't hurting, either.

It's sort of like me trying to buy a new LCD at 1920x1200 -- everyone seems to have given up on that size in favor of the 1920x1080. To 90% of the people out there the extra 120px on the bottom doesn't make a difference.

With regard to the 6GB/s thing -- yeah it's all crap. The drive won't push more than 130-140MB/s transfer sequential anyway, even the WD60000HLHX won't come close to the 6GB/s limit.

If only I could find this kind of deal in 2.5 inch...