Conclusions and Final Thoughts
Conclusions
Remember at the beginning when I said you couldn’t usually get the best of both worlds in anything? Well it might seem that in this case you have that opportunity.
Performance
The performance of the new Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB hard drive was nothing short of spectacular. This was my first encounter with the world of perpendicular recording technology on hard drive platters (though WD didn’t invent it) and the benefits to capacity and speed are obvious. Even though the drive spun at 7200 RPM compared to the Raptor’s 10k RPM, it was able to out-muscle it in a large variety of our benchmarks. And not just one type of benchmark mind you — it excelled at both read and writing operations as we saw in both our PCPer File Create/Copy tests and in the Yapt application.
Not only that, but you get the capacity you want as well with the WD7500AASKS — 750GB versus the 150GB of the WD Raptor X drives. Getting five times more capacity on the drive should definitely help out with all those games, video and other media files you’ll no doubt have on your system and prevent you from having to purchase both a Raptor and another storage drive.
Warranty
If there was a drawback to Western Digital’s line of hard drives, it is in the warranty. The OEM drives get a 3-year warranty while the retail drives (for some unknown reason) get only a 1-year. Both Seagate and Maxtor (now the same company) offer better options for consumer coverage with a 5-year warranty on their hard drives.
Pricing
The current going rate for the new Western Digital WD7500AAKS drive on our pricing engine is about $190. Compared to the Raptor 150GB model that we were comparing it to, the prices are nearly identical at $190. If we want to compare it to other manufacturer’s 750GB drive models we find the Seagate 750GB model falls in at around $205 while the Hitachi 750GB drive will cost you about $220.
This puts the new WD7500AAKS drive in a very positive position as it can offer superior performance to the Raptor 150GB drive in many cases and the same storage capacity as other competing drives, all for less money out of your pocket. Nice, huh?
Final Thoughts
The new Western Digital WD7500AAKS Caviar SE16 750GB hard drive is one of those rare times when I can clearly say recommending this product is right thing to do. The performance of the new perpendicular-based 188GB platters makes this model almost as fast as WD’s own Raptor 150GB hard drive, a feat we once thought unthinkable during its initial launch. And you don’t lose the capacity of modern hard drive to get this speed — 750GB should enough for the most demanding of users. If we could ask WD to step up in one area it would be in warranty coverage and match their competitors.
The Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB hard drive (WD7500AAKS) is able to give us the best of THREE worlds it turns out: performance, capacity and price. Hard to beat that!
If you have any questions, comments or ideas about this review of the product, hop into our PCPer Storage Forum to discuss!
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I am using a 750gb western
I am using a 750gb western drive,i formatted 6 times since 2010,it wont allow me to install an operating system,what could possible be the cause of this.
I gave up and tried to use it as a back up,when i try to transfer files to it.the transfer speed reduces to 356kb evebn though i am using windows 8.help please whats the solution for this problem.