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Just got my 120GB WD 8MB SE...

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eliteoneXP

Member
Joined
Jul 13, 2002
And all I can say is WOW! This hard drive is much faster than i expected it to be. I previously owned a 80MB maxtor drive which started making high pitched noises which really gave me a headache...so i got this new WD. This drive is simply amazing and i cant wait to grab another to throw it on a RAID 0 config. I highly recommend it for you ppl who arent sure which drive to get.
 
You mean ATA 100 or ATA 133? It is ATA 100 only, but ATA 133 doesnt really do you that much good from what i have heard.
 
you can get a 40GB SE for $96 at googlegear. That's the smallest drive that has the 8MB cache technology. -- Paul
 
80 GB is a great deal, but I don't use that much room anyway, and I've been disappointed on MIB's before ... (although pricematching .... :))

Good tip! :) -- Paul
 
i currently use 2 100gig's in a riad 0...i cant say enuff about these drives..absolutely amazing.

I do have ide prefetch, whatever that is, on my mobo, but lemme tell ya, i can load up 4 adobe programs , flash, director, 3dmax, and rhino 3d the4 FIRST time in about, all at once mind you, 10 seconds. Now ill close them all down and reopen them all at once, no more than 2 secs for all of them. Now thats 16mg's of cache kickn some beeee-hind!

I f im useing two or three progies, its a snap. photoshop takes about .25 seconds..WOW! its just there .... lol
 
Just got mine a few days ago too. Can't say much about it though because my stupid Win2k install got corrupted somehow after spending hours installing drivers and programs. Haven't had the time today to resintall.

One thing that is bugging me though. It isn't a 120GB drive. It isn't even close. My drive turns out having 111.7GB of space. Sure, that's more than 110GB, but it seems to be to be pretty much lying saying that a 112GB drive is 120. That's 8 Gigs of space I thought I was supposed to have. I would most certainly be angry if I bought a 40Gig drive that only had 32Gigs on it.
 
That's pretty standard. The "define" a GB to be 1000 MB, although in reality, 1 GB = 1024 MB. So, a 120"GB" hard drive is
120000 MB = 117.19 GB. The remaining discrepancy you see is probably due to MBR, etc. (But don't quote me on that one.;))

My 40-gigger shows up as 37.2, which is 2 GB short of the theoretical 39 GB. It would be interesting to know where that 2GB went, but on the other hand, I'm only using 6.54 GB at the moment. :)

I know it's pretty disappointing, but it's been done this way for years. Personally, I think they should make a more prominent note of that, or maybe write "gB" instead of "GB", or something to that effect.

Oh, well. Hope you get your problems worked out!!! -- Paul
 
macklin01 said:
That's pretty standard. The "define" a GB to be 1000 MB, although in reality, 1 GB = 1024 MB. So, a 120"GB" hard drive is
120000 MB = 117.19 GB. The remaining discrepancy you see is probably due to MBR, etc. (But don't quote me on that one.;))

Even with that definition, they're still way off from the correct amount. I have exactly 114400MB of space on my "120 gig" drive. Even if a gig was 1000MB, that's still only 114.4GB, which means the hard drive gnomes have stolen 5.6GB of my pretty new space.

Oh well, 114.4GB is still a huge jump compared to my previous "60 gig" drive (which I now should check to see how much space it actually has). Not bad for $70.
 
Hi. Yes, it still comes up short.

Ah, I just looked more closely at WD's site. They define a MB as 1,000,000 bytes and a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. So, let's see how this adds up. You have

120 "GB" = 120,000,000,000 bytes
= 117187500 KB
= 114440.92 MB
= 111.76 GB

Looks like that works out.

I haven't had the chance to look and see if Maxtor, etc. do this. My first indication is a surprise and it seems that Maxtor doesn't use this convention. But I haven't had time to look thoroughly.

But you're certainly right --- no matter what, it's certainly a huge drive! :) -- Paul
 
Thanks for the tip! I wonder if they change convention at some point, because when I was at Maxtor's site, I choose a random hdd model (turned out to be ATA66), and it was listed as 20490 MB.

At any rate, what matters is how they do it now. Thanks for the tip, James! :) -- Paul
 
I love my two 100gig SE's. I have the same problem with low usable space, too. After the RAID and NTFS format, I net 186gb total. Of course, I'm not running out of space anytime soon, and the drives are quiet and lightning quick.
 
Do you guy's think this is worth getting ? Cuz i'm in the market for a HDD and I dunno what i want.
 
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