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A
Closer Look
Inside
the now familiar but still nicely designed box, the
drive comes cushioned from the wrath of the delivery
driver by two supporting end moldings designed to
keep it suspended away from the box walls and which
also help absorb some of the inevitable shocks from
transportation. Keeping the drive company are a floppy
disk containing WD's excellent Data Lifeguard Tools
which automate and drastically simplify the partitioning
and formatting process, a Data Lifeguard EZ-Install
guide, the manual, an ATA-100 IDE ribbon cable and
a small bag with the securing screws and a jumper.
The supplied version of Data Lifeguard Tools was v2.8
which according to WD's site "should only be
used with drives LESS than 137GB" which seems
a little strange but if in doubt you can get other
versions of the software directly from their site
HERE.
Packaging
The
drive itself isn't anything out of the ordinary on
inspection, in fact it looks pretty much like any
other hard drive out there. Hard drive manufacturers
seem to be among the last to get "with it"
as far as looks go with none of them seeming to want
to be sucked into using bright finish colours or mirror
finish chromed surfaces. I'm sure it'll happen, even
though not much of the drives are visible when they're
mounted. I'm also a little surprised we're not seeing
fins or other forms of passive cooling measures pressed
or cast into the casing yet but maybe that too will
come as spin speeds continue to climb
Top
Bottom
Ultra100
TX2 Controller
The
supplied Promise Technology Ultra ATA/100 controller
card supports 66MHz PCI motherboards as well as conventional
33MHz PCI boards. The broader bandwidth of 66MHz PCI
theoretically assures maximum drive performance over
the PCI bus with CRC error-checking, greater data
reliability, and faster transfers.
In
most cases I doubt this card will be used for little
more than adding ATA-100 support to older motherboards
that lack it but it's certainly useful for those who
want to add more IDE devices to their system.
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