You will not be dissapointed with this drive. I got in on the last deal, and I totally love it. It is so quiet and very speedy. Excellent deal.
May not be disappointed with drive but it does not carry the WD 3-Year warranty. I didn't think this was much of a problem since even a one-year Dell backed warranty seemed reasonable. However, the drive I received had a loud whinning sound all the time that was louder than all the fans combined and then some. You could hear it outside the room - it was a relief when it wound down at shutdown. I'm not saying it was jet level noise, just a intrusive and constant whine. Anyway to shorten the story:
I called Dell for replacement and it was an interesting first call. Initially, they didn't know what to do since I didn't have a Dell desktop PC with service number.... that took a while.
Then finally the CSR told me to call Western Digital - "They handle all our warranty work", "But this is a Dell branded drive that doesn't show up with warranty at their site" says I, "Oh, they handle all the warranty work, even those" and provided the WD number.
Called WD and got a very pleasant CSR who immediately agreed that a new noisy drive was a problem and should be replaced. I explained that it was purcahsed from Dell and after a few model number checks he confirmed that Dell would need to handle the replacement. He parted with a "Tell them I said it needs to be replaced and call me back if there is a problem". Wish it was WD backed..
Called Dell up again. Took a long time, probably 30-40 minutes after I got the CSR before he had "checked how to handle ... etc" and it took my quoting the WD rep to get them to finally agree to replace. New one did arrive promptly within 2 days with return label - that was great. And the replacement drive is quiet. However, I will wait for a better WD backed deal next time. The extra $30-40 for 3-years and real service is a difference I'm willing to pay.
THAT said - it is a nice drive.
I called Dell for replacement and it was an interesting first call. Initially, they didn't know what to do since I didn't have a Dell desktop PC with service number.... that took a while.
Then finally the CSR told me to call Western Digital - "They handle all our warranty work", "But this is a Dell branded drive that doesn't show up with warranty at their site" says I, "Oh, they handle all the warranty work, even those" and provided the WD number.
Called WD and got a very pleasant CSR who immediately agreed that a new noisy drive was a problem and should be replaced. I explained that it was purcahsed from Dell and after a few model number checks he confirmed that Dell would need to handle the replacement. He parted with a "Tell them I said it needs to be replaced and call me back if there is a problem". Wish it was WD backed..
Called Dell up again. Took a long time, probably 30-40 minutes after I got the CSR before he had "checked how to handle ... etc" and it took my quoting the WD rep to get them to finally agree to replace. New one did arrive promptly within 2 days with return label - that was great. And the replacement drive is quiet. However, I will wait for a better WD backed deal next time. The extra $30-40 for 3-years and real service is a difference I'm willing to pay.
THAT said - it is a nice drive.
I got this drive few months ago. I put it in my server, so it runs pretty much 24/7. I have no problems with it whats so ever. BTW this bastard is FAST. In my opinion, price wise and performance wise, this drive beats SCSI 10 times over!
Two thumbs up!
Jnox
Two thumbs up!
Jnox
LOL! Obviously someone who has been reading too much WD promotional literature on their special edition drives. We benchmarked two of these drives in a "real world" high traffic application using a Dell Pentium 2.0Ghz Pentium IV Xeon unit and an IBM Intellistation Itanium Z Pro against standard Ultra2 10K drives and these were on average 40% slower than those old technology Ultra2 SCSI drives. Against our high performance 15K Seagate Cheetahs, these WD drive don't even rank. Sure you can get some spectaular burst rates in benchmarking tools, but the substained rates are pitifull.
Newbie question: How does one get the 20% off again? I've heard about maybe a dozen Dell 20% off deals, and I have no idea of which is up-to-date.
Great deal, btw.
Great deal, btw.
Dell routinely offers coupons and/or percentages off on various products. Any time they advertise 20% off dell branded, 10% software, or the like...the discount is taken off automatically when you add the item to your cart. In addition, sometimes you can stack coupons with the advertised deal (although not in this case...yet), in which case you cut/paste the code into the "add coupon" box on your cart screen. When applicable, check the deal sites for the coupon codes. Also worth mentioning for this deal, the half off shipping discounts are displayed when you estimate the shipping fees by typing your zip and city.
For review of the drive, please visit www.StorageReview.com. Please tell readers the url of your review, otherwise they may consider it BSing or showboating.
This is a great price for the OEM (Dell branded) drive, with no rebates involved.
Beginning 6/23, the Retail version with 3 year warranty is available at Compusa for $269.99 less $120 mail in rebate, making the final price $149.99. More details here
How many of these do I really need?
I already have four.:Q
Beginning 6/23, the Retail version with 3 year warranty is available at Compusa for $269.99 less $120 mail in rebate, making the final price $149.99. More details here
How many of these do I really need?
isnt that hard drive the DELL OEM manufactured by Western Digital and ONLY comes with a 1 year warranty
magis123
Member
For those of you who wondered about anyone getting order confirmation, I got mine tonight/this morning at 01:55 AM EDT ... not too shabby ... picked up 2 for $306.50 shipped 2nd day ... says that the order should be filled on the 28th, but I doubt that will happen ... we'll see ...
The problem being that a SCSI drive that is 40% SMALLER will cost you more than TWICE as much as a 120 gb IDE drive! I just checked pricewatch and a 73 gb SCSI was $400. The only people that should be worried about buying SCSI are people buying servers. And that usually means the company is buying it anyway and not some single person surfing anandtech in their spare time...
You want performance? Buy a couple IDE's and RAID 0 them. Probably will cost the same as a single SCSI drive anyway, not to mention much more space.
My order status says that my 2 drives have been shipped, but it isn't showing a tracking number yet. I ordered on 6/20.
BTW - Just to muddy up the issue:
I ordered 3 of the Western Digital 5400 drives from outpost.com a few weeks ago (special $109 deal).
They were bare drives, but the sticker on the mylar bag says "3 year warranty".
(the website also said they come with a 3 year warranty).
So, it seems that SOME Western Digital bare/oem drives DO come with a 3 year warranty.
(perhaps some of the eBay auctions ARE correct in claiming to have a 3 year warranty).
Regards, TwF
I ordered 3 of the Western Digital 5400 drives from outpost.com a few weeks ago (special $109 deal).
They were bare drives, but the sticker on the mylar bag says "3 year warranty".
(the website also said they come with a 3 year warranty).
So, it seems that SOME Western Digital bare/oem drives DO come with a 3 year warranty.
(perhaps some of the eBay auctions ARE correct in claiming to have a 3 year warranty).
Regards, TwF
Originally posted by: straubs
The problem being that a SCSI drive that is 40% SMALLER will cost you more than TWICE as much as a 120 gb IDE drive! I just checked pricewatch and a 73 gb SCSI was $400. The only people that should be worried about buying SCSI are people buying servers. And that usually means the company is buying it anyway and not some single person surfing anandtech in their spare time...
You want performance? Buy a couple IDE's and RAID 0 them. Probably will cost the same as a single SCSI drive anyway, not to mention much more space.
Good reply except the remark that prompted the reply that you quoted was about server performance. As a matter of fact, it was a comment to the effect that, in this persons opinion, the wd1200jb was TEN times better price and performance wise than a scsi drive. Obviously, as you yourself state, in the world of server performance, scsi is king. Here is the exact remark;
Obviously, this person is either intentionally exaggerating or works in the Western Digital PR department.
Bottom line=WD1200jb rules the roost in the desktop performance world of ide hard drives. Going beyond that statement into reliability issues and or server performance is a whole different ballgame.
Slow down there, cowboy! You wrote:
You want performance? Buy a couple IDE's and RAID 0 them.
Look, you can't do that. You can't build a high performance disk system from low performance disks by sprinkling RAID fairy dust on the drive casings. A particular disk is going to deliver a particular number of I/Os per second and the available low end RAID hardware is not going to multiply that number of I/Os. There is no substitute in IDE land for a Seagate 15K RPM drive. RAID 0 on IDE is a great solution for fault tolerance but a crappy solution for (non-consecutive sector) performance.
In principle, if you were just doing reads, then yeah, RAID 0 could give you something like a linear increase in number of I/Os per second based on the number of disks in the array. But the available hardware doesn't do that. Furthermore, when you mix writes into the picture, a serious problem develops, even in principle. All of a sudden you have to keep track of whether a particular page or sector is dirty, and if so you have to wait. One way or another the bottleneck is going to be the actual performance of the devices in the array. That's why we're not all using an array of DVD-R jukeboxes. The bytes/dollar performance of those is great; the I/Os/sec is not. Kind of like 7200 RPM IDE drives.
I love a bunch of cheap drives as much as the next fellow but it is overreaching to say that these drives can replace high end SCSI.
You want performance? Buy a couple IDE's and RAID 0 them.
Look, you can't do that. You can't build a high performance disk system from low performance disks by sprinkling RAID fairy dust on the drive casings. A particular disk is going to deliver a particular number of I/Os per second and the available low end RAID hardware is not going to multiply that number of I/Os. There is no substitute in IDE land for a Seagate 15K RPM drive. RAID 0 on IDE is a great solution for fault tolerance but a crappy solution for (non-consecutive sector) performance.
In principle, if you were just doing reads, then yeah, RAID 0 could give you something like a linear increase in number of I/Os per second based on the number of disks in the array. But the available hardware doesn't do that. Furthermore, when you mix writes into the picture, a serious problem develops, even in principle. All of a sudden you have to keep track of whether a particular page or sector is dirty, and if so you have to wait. One way or another the bottleneck is going to be the actual performance of the devices in the array. That's why we're not all using an array of DVD-R jukeboxes. The bytes/dollar performance of those is great; the I/Os/sec is not. Kind of like 7200 RPM IDE drives.
I love a bunch of cheap drives as much as the next fellow but it is overreaching to say that these drives can replace high end SCSI.
"RAID 0 on IDE is a great solution for fault tolerance " Uh actually Raid 0 provides no fault tolerance.
God damn it. Don't you hate it when you say something that's just wrong? Let's pretend I was thinking something like "RAID 1 is great for fault tolerance and RAID 0 is great for sequential access bandwidth, but RAID anything won't give you lots more I/Os per second."
As was discussed in the last WD from Dell thread when it was down to $125, that's because of the confusion surrounding the whole OEM/retail thing. There are actually THREE main types of packaging. Bulk/bare/brownbox/whitebox/static bag type packaging is one type, and this is the type that you nearly always get. This is also the type that's advertised as OEM nearly everywhere but in reality its NOT OEM. This also nearly always has the full warranty from the manufacture (in this case WD), the main differance is that you don't get the retail packaging with all the accessories (in the case of a hard drive, you dont get the cable, the screws and a floppy disk that you can d/l for free anyway). 2nd type of packaging, retail, we all probably know what this is.
Third type of packaging: OEM. The REAL OEM stuff is bought by large companies (like dell) who then put the hard drives in thier own systems. They get a very large discount when buying the drives. Why? Because they agree to handle ALL the support issues for those drives, and they buy a very large quantity. Dell has a whole support department anyway, so they just lump the support costs in with the costs associated when you buy an entire system. I don't know why they are selling these seperatly, but they are. And since dell has agreed to support those drives themselves, there's no support from WD. Note that this applies to the TRUE oem stuff from dell, not the retail packages of this drive that dell has sold before.
So to summarize, most people and retailers confuse OEM with bulk packaged stuff. Bulk packaged usually has full warranties from manufacturer, True OEM stuff has no warranty except from place of purchase.
The drive you got from outpost was NOT oem, just a bare drive. However, I'm thinking that a lot of these drives sold on ebay are FROM dell, and the people selling either don't know the reality of the situation, or they don't care about it and are purposfully misleading people about it. After all, someone probably won't actually check into it for warranty service until at least a few months have passed, then its too late to go back to the ebay person. Its unethical. Unfortunately that's the sorta stuff that sometimes happens on ebay, so make sure you know exactly what you get when you purchase something on ebay. I've never gotten burned on buying ebay, because I ALWAYS check into things BEFORE I buy. For instance, when you see photoshop 7 for sale on ebay, make sure it doesn't say its a "backup copy" there are SO many of those illegal copies for sale on ebay its not funny.
Just got my drives. I checked the serial numbers on the westerndigital web page, and there is no warranty on the drives.
question re: 30 day.. i bought one of these a few months ago, no probelm yet (knock on this fake wood on my desk), but lets say i have a problem in the next year (hope not!). my uncle has a dell computer, could i tell them that it was in his machine (As i bought it as a present for him) and would the 1year apply? thanks
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 25K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 21K
-
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread- Started by TheF34RChannel
- Replies: 23K
-
-
Facebook
Twitter