THE WESTERN DIGITAL WD273BA 27.3 GB,
7,200 RPM, ATA/66 HARD DISK DRIVE
Last updated: 11/16/99

If you are looking for a high-capacity, high-performance hard disk drive, Western Digital's WD273BA 27.3 GByte drive is big, fast, quiet, and cool.

I recently installed WD273BA hard disk in a  computer with an AMD 650 Mhz Athlon processor, MSI MS-6167 motherboard, and 128 MBytes of memory and this drive (and the motherboard) performs.  Here are the bench marks:

WINBENCH 99 (v. 1.1)

WINTUNE 98

HD TACH (v. 2.60)

The HD Tach Read Bust Speed is particularly telling.  At last, an ATA/66 drive (and motherboard) that nearly does ATA/66.

The above picture does not do the drive justice.  Its finely machined appearance stands-out when viewed along side some of the 5,400 RPM drives I have hanging around the shop.

In an open case the WD273BA is quite cool to the touch.  During normal operation it only draws about a 1/3 of an Amp and dissipates about 10 Watts of heat.  From it's low noise level, one wouldn't guess that those platters inside are whirring around at 7,200 RPM.  It generates about 38/45 dBA (idle/seek modes)  of noise which is between the 20 dBA of noise when someone whispers at five feet and the 60 dBA of normal conversation (the scale is logarithmic).

I had absolutely no problem installing Windows 98 SE on the drive.  I would, however, very strongly suggest giving some thought on how the drive should be partitioned before beginning.  If you think you would like one gigantic 27.3 GB C: drive, try defragging a 6.4 GB C: drive.  Also, drive performance decreases from first part of the drive to the last--the heads have to swing further.  A 4 GB C: drive would make a good compromise between capacity for Windows, programs, and frequently used data and performance. The drive in the beforementioned computer was part'd into a 4 GB C: drive and the remainder was allocated to the D: drive.

The WD273BA comes with a 3-year limited warrantee from a major manufacturer and is available in boxed-retail and OEM versions.

It's more drive than I need...

Larry

Specifications, etc.

Test Computer: AMD 650 Mhz Athlon processor, MSI MS-6167 motherboard, 1/2 MB cache' (part of the processor), 128 MB, 6 ns PC100 memory, Western Digital WD273BA hard disk, Windows 98 OEM SE with FAT32 file system (4 GB C: drive, defragged), Diamond Viper V770 Display Adapter with 32 MB.

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