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Western Digital Hard Drives

Western Digital is the second largest hard drive manufacturer and is probably number one in the consumer new and replacement hard drive market.

Western Digital has been around since 1970 but didn't enter the hard drive business until 1988 when it bought the hard drive division of Tandon (one of the pioneers in hard drive technology). With its headquarters in Lake Forest, California, Western Digital employs over 50,000 people in California, Malaysia and Thailand. Western Digital sells to OEM, systems manufacturers, resellers and retailers. Western digital produces hard drives and solid state drives with advanced technology for consumer storage and media products too.

Western Digital's Caviar line consists of three different series. Blue for the basic features, Green for the new eco-friendly models, and Black for the high performance hard drives. The blue and green models go up to 1TB with SATA 3GB transfer rate and the black models go up to 2TB with SATA 6GB transfer rate.

Western Digital also has some of the number one specialty hard drives in the market place. Here's the top sellers in consumer models for desktop computers:

Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB for about $130. The only drawback to this hard drive is it's got a top spin rate of 5400. When you get a lot data on there, this can be an issue. You also need to use a special utility to format for Windows XP due to the way that the hard drive uses clusters. One of the ways this drive can out perform a faster spindle rpm unit is that the size of the clusters is larger and so fewer writes or reads are necessary to transfer the same amount of data.

The next best selling, and would be my choice, is the Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache. The biggest reason is the higher spin rate and faster performance. I'm not really sure the green model saves that much energy as to sacrifice the speed and performance of the black model. And for $25 less than the green model, I'd go for the faster of the two. If you are interested in high performance and fast copy times, stay with the black models.

Next up in performance hard drives is the Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor SATA 10,000 RPM 16 MB for around $200. It's the number one selling 10000 RPM Hard Drive and rightfully so at it's blistering fast performance. You will feel the difference in almost every scenario from boot times to handling large files. This is form the guys that do some serious computing or game playing. If you have the need for speed, this model is for you. You can learn more on this web page that has more information on this model here: 10000 RPM Hard Drives.

There are many models with smaller capacities, like the Western Digital 500 GB ATA100 7200rpm 16 MB for around $80 that are great drives but for another $20 I'd go for the black 1TB version. They also have a 160GB version for under $50. How about a 2TB hard drive for your laptop (2.5 inch format) for just $150? That's a whole lot of storage for the money, especially in the small power consumption green version.

The higher speed hard drives are designed especially for Windows 7 or Linux desktops that can really fly with these high capacity drives. Most models come with up to 3 year warranties and some with 5 years. Reliability is an important issue with any hard drive and Western Digital has a very good record in providing very high mean failure times (amount of average time most drives will fail).

The entire Western Digital Hard Drive consumer product line provides great value, performance, and reliability. I don't think you'll find a better hard drive solution for most desktop or laptop models. Throw in some of the best prices of any hard drive across all sizes and formats and you have the best deal are data storage.

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