The Logic Off Topic list

On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 08:36 AM, Jeremy Martin wrote:

> Speaking of hard drives, what do you think of the new WD2000JB from
> Western Digital? It doesn't use fluid bearings yet but it's still as
> quiet as a DeskStar and the "BB" model (that has a smaller cache)
> will eventually use fluid bearings for improved acoustics though I'm
> not sure if that's really worth reducing the 8 mb buffer. Anyway the
> controversial thing about this new great drive is that while it's an
> awesome performer (56 mbytes/s sustained transfer rate!) its average
> seek time is a little high around 14 ms compared to some of the
> competition, though none of the faster-seek-time drives come close to
> its other synthetic and real world benchmark scores. Think that would
> be ok for audio with regular defragmenting etc?

I have to say that I have had a WD drive fail on me after 6 months 
(shipped oem in my first g4) - so I am leery of this company. Take that 
with the usual grain of salt.

The spec sounds good - if you are playing/recording long audio files - 
if you are playing stuff that is edited - or lots of regions etc etc - 
i.e. more numerous smaller files - then I guess the seek time starts to 
become a factor.

Quiet is good but not essential. Realistically isolation is the only 
solution to noise problems for drive/fan noise - especially if they 
leak into your recording environment. So you can get away with noisier 
equipment if properly isolated from you and your mics.