WD 40 Gb special edition available

[brad]

AT last, WD has introduced a 40 gig version of their special edition model - WD400JB with a single platter and 8 meg cache. Now there is one more people can sink their teeth into.

http://www.westerndigital.com/produc...asp?DriveID=36

[sonyfier]

Great Idea and about time as there was huge demand for such a drive. The 80 gig version was a little pricey for some so they should do very well with the 40 gig version.
Wonder how long before it's seen in Oz though, if at all.
Thanks for the info now I wan't one real bad

[brad]

Demand should be strong for a while. I don't expect to see any reviews of it though because emphasis is on larger capacity models using 60 gig platters. That'll up the perf ante still more but it also makes people pay for storage space they may not want or need just to get the performance. WD screwed up by not bringing it out early in the JB game.

[sonyfier]

Agreed it should have been released earlier but then again the 80 gig version took a while as well and only really came about because of feedback and demand.

If it's priced closely to other 40gig models I can see a large OEM market for it.
Also should be popular for a Raid 0 setup, currently raiding 2 80 gig drives gives a 160 gig partition which is kind of silly for 99% of users playing with Raid as they would unlikely ever fill it.

Speaking personally I can't see sense in having huge drives for an OS. In my dual boot setup I'm using about 10 gig (currently) between 2 operating systems with quite a lot of programs installed. I prefer to have a small fast HD for the OS and seperate file storage etc to other drives so they're not taken down with an OS crash or HD failure.

I might buy one of these to replace my IBM as main system drive if and when they become available here.

[brad]

Agree all the way. I have no use whatsoever for these 80 gig drives on my windoze box but that was the only way to get the performance at the time. Now, and assuming the 400JB measures up, we have a more practical choice.

Ya know, it really gets me how folks will spend gobs and gobs of money on a couple new mobos a year, jacking up cpu speed 10 or 20 percent, the latest Geforce, overkill memory, what have you, and never once think about what is by far THE slowest thing in a PC. Even when there really is a way to get a substantial seat of the pants improvement, they'll pass it up. The felt difference between my old 1.4 Ghz KT133 board and this XP-1900 KT333 box with the same drives pales compared to the difference a JB makes for normal run of the mill daily stuff.

Brad