Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB

Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB Capacities Model Number Capacity WD1200JB 120 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction A few months ago Western Digital made quite a splash with the introduction of its Caviar WD1000 Special Edition, the first drive to feature an 8-megabyte buffer. Preparing a press release on the product, WD contacted us requesting an expedited review on the product. Never one to turn down a scoop, we agreed and put the WD1000BB-SE (retroactively christened the WD1000JB) to the test. Testbed2 was on its final legs in those days- at that time, we had to rely on WinBench 99 to report desktop performance. Unsurprisingly, in such circumstances, the BB-SE performed exceptionally well, giving even 15k RPM drives a run for their money.

The BB-SE's most interesting performance was yet to come, however, under our recently-deployed Testbed3, a much more contemporary, relevant, and reliable way to assess drive performance. The drive's score of 397 I/Os per second in the StorageReview.com Office DriveMark 2002 was far and away the best for an ATA drive. Indeed, while it didn't quite measure up to 15k RPM offerings, the BB-SE nonetheless bested most 10k units.

Company officials went out of the way to point out that the WD1000BB-SE was "special edition" in every sense of the word and that they were "by no means overproducing these units." They did, however, say that they would carefully monitor sales and decide whether to proceed with more 8 MB products. Though enthusiasts around the world are used to plopping hundreds of megs of RAM into their machines at bargain rates, the fact is that going from 2 to 8 megabytes of buffer is not a trivial expense for a drive company. In addition to the cost of the memory itself, board layout, inventory issues, and most importantly firmware optimizations add a bit to the cost. Pennies here and pennies there are significant for firms in an industry that has to scratch and claw its way to profitability. The recent upswing in memory prices likely doesn't help.

Nonetheless, the community as a whole was pleased to receive reports of "standard" 120 GB WD1200BB drives equipped with 8-megabyte buffers even as WD continued to insist to us that there was no such beast. Yet finally, early this month, the company relented and officially announced the Caviar WD1200JB.

Like its brother, the WD1200BB, the JB features a 7200 RPM spindle speed coupled with three 40 GB platters. Claimed average seek time is 8.9 milliseconds, a plateau that WD's drives have rested on for some time now. The JB's key feature, of course, is its 8-meg buffer, four times that of competing drives. An ATA-standard 3-year warranty backs the drive.

As was the WD1000BB-SE, the 1200JB targets a market of power-user enthusiasts who seek desktop performance that rival's today's top SCSI drives. It also aims for the entry-level server market though we're skeptical whether an increased buffer size can really impact the heavy random, non-localized patterns that arise.

Does the WD1200JB live up to its predecessor? Let's move on and take a look!