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Tom's Harware finally hits rock bottom

J

jaeger66

Banned
I love the article on the Western Digital 1200JB-"Western Digital WD1200JB With 8 MB Cache: Outperforms SCSI Drives". Yet somehow whichever of his lackeys wrote it forgot to benchmark any SCSI drives. If he had, he might have noticed that the Maxtor Atlas 10K III blows it out of the water(and let's not get into the Seagate X15-36LP). Pathetic, and it's been that way for a while.

Sorry, just had to rant.
 
it doesn't say it outperforms all scsi drives, does it? no. i'm sure it outperforms the 80 MB drive that was in my Mac II si(R).





i only trust drive reviews from storagereview.
 
stupid...

it will beat old Fast Wide or Ultra Narrow, but U2W and U160 own it.

im not sure where UW stands, depends on wether youre going for seek times or data transfer i guess.
besides, a scsi drive doesnt have to wait for the other drive(s)
either way, scsi owns

 


<< it doesn't say it outperforms all scsi drives, does it? no. i'm sure it outperforms the 80 MB drive that was in my Mac II si(R). >>


This is the title: "Western Digital WD1200JB With 8 MB Cache: Outperforms SCSI Drives"
From this title most people would envision it being faster than scsi 'drives' not a specific 'drive', its like saying: "Cyrix 686 600mhz -pr-: Outperforms x86 CPU's"
Futher, he has no proof it outperforms scsi drives because he forgot to test it 😀
 


<< it doesn't say it outperforms all scsi drives, does it? no. i'm sure it outperforms the 80 MB drive that was in my Mac II si(R). >>



Well, it outperforms the combined IQ of the person who wrote the review, the person who put it up on the site, and the average poster on community.tomshardware.com

Sad to remember that I only found AT through TH...
 
Ahh....Tom's Hardware....everyone's favorite site to bash...



To the author's credit, the drive DOES beat out most 10k SCSI drives (with the exception of maxtor and fujitsu) although I how anyone is supposed to infer that from the article is a bit beyond me since it obviously lacks the benchmarking to back up the title.

My other peeve is that they tested an IBM 60GXP when the 120GXP is what SHOULD have been benchmarked against the WD1200JB. They toss in last year's model and somehow expect it to look comparable...

If he had, he might have noticed that the Maxtor Atlas 10K III blows it out of the water(and let's not get into the Seagate X15-36LP).

1. The Seagate is a 15k drive, not a 10k drive.
2. The Maxtor Atlas does not "blow it out of the water" by any means. Server performance, yes. Desktop performance? No.


To be fair, the JB is an awesome drive (I love mine) and a perfectly practical alternative to SCSI (minus the cost), but I agree with all that the article was fairly shoddy and basically a recap of everything storagereview did, minus the in-depth benchmarks.


 


<< 1. The Seagate is a 15k drive, not a 10k drive. >>


I'm aware of that, however the article made no such distinction.


<< 2. The Maxtor Atlas does not "blow it out of the water" by any means. Server performance, yes. Desktop performance? No. >>


Gaming and Office apps show significant gains on the Maxtor.

This article might be as bad as the one on Tweaktown about the 75GXPs.
 
Also, I'm not bashing the WD. I'd probably buy one if it came in a smaller capacity. But what the hell am I going to do with 120GB? That's more, ah, "adult imagery" than I can handle.
 
You're telling me that modest gains in office and gaming leads equates to one drive blowing the other one out of the water?

I think not - not to mention you're comparing a ~$230 drive to a six or seven hundred dollar drive, plus controller. I'd say that extra few percent just ain't worth the cost, but that's just me...


As for the 15k seagate, I seriously doubt they'd be stupid enough to even say the WD1200JB competes with it - because it doesn't. I still don't think it's a fair observation on your part.
 


<< You're telling me that modest gains in office and gaming leads equates to one drive blowing the other one out of the water? >>


I don't consider them modest. And when you throw in the sub 8ms access time it's no contest. You can get a 18.5GB Atlas for $189 and a 80GB 5400 RPM drive for data and backup for around $100. A U2W controller can be had for less than $140. That's a premium of around $175 for a better solution in every sense. Not too bad considering that some people, well a lot of people, are running around buying $50 heatsinks.
 
I don't consider them modest.

Looking at them, you're right - they are significant, but nothing that warrants one drive "blowing" the other drive out of the water.

And when you throw in the sub 8ms access time it's no contest.

I really don't notice the access time on my WD, to be honest. I didn't on my old SCSI system either, and that was < 8ms.


You can get a 18.5GB Atlas for $189 and a 80GB 5400 RPM drive for data and backup for around $100. A U2W controller can be had for less than $140. That's a premium of around $175 for a better solution in every sense.

....no, it's really not. You try working with 350+ meg files off of an old 5400 rpm hard drive - at the same point in time, I could fill that 18.5 gig Atlas in less than two weeks with the things I do with my PC - for comparing individual drives, it isn't practical or fair to compare an 18.5 gig SCSI drive to a 120 gig EIDE drive since they're both intended to do very different things, IMO. For people who need high speed storage, and lots of it, this is no alternative at all - and it would be another two hundred bucks on top of that. Granted, this set up is very, very good - but you're already talking $430 for storage alone, when the WD1200JB is about $230 online and *far* faster than an old IDE 5400 hard drive.



Either way - I don't mean to bash you or the Maxtor (which is, by all means, a top-notch drive and if I had the money for 73 gig versions I'd be all over that) but I just wanted to point out that the wd1200jb is in fact a direct competitor to almost any 10k SCSI drive. Although tom's article didn't show that, the SR.com review did.

 
Some of the newer 5400 RPM drives have transfer rates in the 40MB+ range and access times around 14ms(WD800AB). So if you weren't booting or launching apps from it the actual transfer of data is still pretty solid. Split the difference, bump the Atlas to 36GB and knock the IDE to 60GB. I always like separating my apps and data/backup drives anyway.

SCSI just feels faster to me, I always get the impression that IDE drives must "think" before executing. IMO, it's a great upgrade for under $200. Compared to $350 for a GF4, the benefits are much more real and ones you'll notice every time you use your machine.
 
Yep, on a desktop, opening and closing many small files/programs and surfing around, a SCSI drive feels much snappier.

Especailly when dealing with a bunch of Office files and such.

To me, it's mostly all about the seek times. And later SCSI drive have ALL IDE drives beat by at least 100% in this area.

One day I WILL have an X-15. 😀

For now, I'll settle with IDE RAID-0. 🙁
 
I still can't get over the idea that they thought it would be a good idea to use two notebook drive in an IDE RAID array just because they're "quieter" than today's standard drives. WTF were they thinking? 5 decibals less of noise, and spend twice the $ for notebook drives...
 
It doesn't surprise me that this drive outperforms "some" SCSI drives because storage review showed that the Western Digital 100Gb 7200 rpm WD1000BB also outperformed "some" SCSI drives.. From what I recall, they were not all old models either..

By the way, I don't think Tom is always right when it comes to his personal opinions/views on a subject matter, I've even had arguments with him in email over some of them, but he USUALLY gets his "facts" straight for the most part.. STOP THE HATE! 🙂
 
The SCSI drives have their advatnages where it really counts for most uses.

Access times.

STR is important if you work with loads of large files, but for everyday use, access times are much more important, and the 10K SCSI drives definately have the edge in that department.

Not to mention the fact that IDE drives tend to slow the GUI to a crawl when doing intense disk IO, something that doesn't tend to happen with SCSI drives.
 
"It doesn't surprise me that this drive outperforms "some" SCSI drives because storage review showed that the Western Digital 100Gb 7200 rpm WD1000BB also outperformed "some" SCSI drives"

SR has the WD beating all but 3 SCSI drives, the 2 fastest 15k drives (Seagate/Fujitsu) and the Atlas 10KIII, and only the Seagate has a distinct performance advantage. So based solely on application benchmarks, THG actually isn't that far out of line making the comment they did. The 10% advantage the 10KIII has over the WD is not blowing it out of the water. 10% is of course an average, in some applications it will destroy everything IDE, in others it may actually be slower. I'm not going to argue that the WD JB is actually faster than any any current 10k or 15k drive, because I don't think it is, but for someone who doesn't have experience with these drives and is basing their opinion solely on benchmarks, then SCSI does have a rather underwhelming showing. It looks much worse from the layman's perspective when the 120GB WD drive costs barely more than an 18GB 10K III.
 


<< "It doesn't surprise me that this drive outperforms "some" SCSI drives because storage review showed that the Western Digital 100Gb 7200 rpm WD1000BB also outperformed "some" SCSI drives"

SR has the WD beating all but 3 SCSI drives, the 2 fastest 15k drives (Seagate/Fujitsu) and the Atlas 10KIII, and only the Seagate has a distinct performance advantage. So based solely on application benchmarks, THG actually isn't that far out of line making the comment they did. The 10% advantage the 10KIII has over the WD is not blowing it out of the water. 10% is of course an average, in some applications it will destroy everything IDE, in others it may actually be slower. I'm not going to argue that the WD JB is actually faster than any any current 10k or 15k drive, because I don't think it is, but for someone who doesn't have experience with these drives and is basing their opinion solely on benchmarks, then SCSI does have a rather underwhelming showing. It looks much worse from the layman's perspective when the 120GB WD drive costs barely more than an 18GB 10K III. >>



Righto.. Let's put it this way, if I were setting up a server, I'd go SCSI without a question.. As for single user desktops, there are FEW reasons to go SCSI, video editing being one, but there are still just a few.. 🙂
 
LOL 😀

Perhaps Western Digital is feeding Dr. Pabst some advertising dollars? 😛

The 120JB may well be the fastest IDE drive in synthetic benchmarks, but to compare it to the 10K III or X15-36LP ... there is no competition. It's totally absurd.
 
And how about the shocking conclusion that a 1.86 GHz Athlon can't quite keep up with a 3 GHz P4? Or the sad attempts to boost that RAMBUS stock, the fraudulent Quantum LM review, or the idea that a Logitech dual optical is reasonable at $50 but the MS Optical is expensive at $20, or the mislabled graphs, complete lack of editing, brain dead reviewers...they probably sit around in their Official Tom's Hardware jumpsuits smearing oatmeal on their faces trying to remember how to tie their shoes. And what's with that Omid Rahmat guy? I've never read such incoherent drivel. He thinks every line is some sort of joke, unfortuantely humor is something that obviously never developed in whatever the hell country he's from. It's excruciating.

Deep breaths...

Anyway one last thing I like about SCSI-everything on one cable. It appeals to the obsessive case neatness part of me. It does add to the boot time, but that's what suspend-to-RAM is for.
 
Tom benchmarks like Intel. For example, when I went to an Intel chips and tips even they tried to convince me that with benches that the P4 would give me a 25% increase in performance across the baord. When I started wondering what they were comparing it to, I saw the fine print: "Comparison of 1.5Ghz p4 with 2.0 Ghz p4. " and the sad thing was that not all of the stuff was 25% faster😛
 


<<

<< it doesn't say it outperforms all scsi drives, does it? no. i'm sure it outperforms the 80 MB drive that was in my Mac II si(R). >>


This is the title: "Western Digital WD1200JB With 8 MB Cache: Outperforms SCSI Drives"
From this title most people would envision it being faster than scsi 'drives' not a specific 'drive', its like saying: "Cyrix 686 600mhz -pr-: Outperforms x86 CPU's"
Futher, he has no proof it outperforms scsi drives because he forgot to test it 😀 >>

I don't think he "forgot" to test anything. 😉
 
Pariah,



<< SR has the WD beating all but 3 SCSI drives >>



The new Testbed does not include some benchmarks done on fairly recent
drives. Otherwise you'd have to include my Quantum Atlas 10k II in
that group, and probably have to match the WD against a couple of other
drives for a more valid head-to-head analysis. Which is one of the
things that makes the SR database so valuable, even if I can't do an
automatic head-to-head of two drives, I can look at the older database
and make an educated guess.

The WD1200JB is a great drive (I got one myself - need to update Rig stats);
but ultimately, if you are going to make a claim like that article did,
then you had better back it up by actually showing/explaining what
they mean in terms of other drives that they think it is competing with.
In this case that means throwing in the current offerings from
IBM, Maxtor, Seagate and whoever else, and actually throwing a SCSI
drive into a secondary analysis to show how it compares in that arena.

I thought the Xbitlabs writeup
did a much better job of an in-depth review/comparision of this drive.

What is really interesting about these reviews is what it is likely to
do for the industry as a whole. If IBM and Maxtor decide to add the
benefit of increased cache to IDE drives which already match or exceed the
1200JB on access time, then WD might find itself with more competition
than they wanted. And if this really does start to impact the appeal
of SCSI drives in a significant way, then those manufacturers will
have to pull out the technologies they've been sitting on for the
past few years to make SCSI become more the "professional" choice again.
 
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