Western Digital AV 160 GB WD1600AVBB Reviews

The AV series drives have been tailored to deliver optimised AV performance, and is targeted at the CE segment (HDD Recorders, Video Surveillance Recorders, etc.) and digital video professionals. According to WD, a lot of research has gone into engineering these drives to incorporate enhanced features. These drives are touted to be very reliable with an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1 million hours, and are rugged enough to survive high-temperature, always-on environments. SilkStream technology provides continuous smooth playback of up to 12 HD streams with an assumed transfer block size of 2 MB per stream. Its compatibility
with the ATA streaming command set also enables CE customers to use standard stream management and error recovery options. IntelliSeek is another technology incorporated here; it calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption and vibration. Indeed, we found this to be a silent performer. The recording heads are parked off the disk surface during spin-up and spin-down and when the drive is off, to reduce wear and improve reliability and non-operational shock tolerance (350 G as opposed to 250 G for standard drives). The drive features Pre-emptive Wear Leveling, which means the drive arm frequently and evenly sweeps across the disk to reduce uneven wear on the disk surface—a common thing with AV streaming applications. The drive consumes less power than non-AV drives; in fact, WD has removed the 3.3 V SATA power from this product. It also runs cooler than most. The drive was better than most other non-AV drives in the synthetic benchmarks. In the real-world tests, it was fast in the sequential file copy test, but lagged behind all the drives we have tested thus far
in the assorted file copy test, taking at least 50% more time. The 2 MB buffer appears
to be too little in an age where 8 MB is the starting point (and it did hurt the performance). At the same price as a 320 GB drive, this fails to justify its price.
Specifications:
160 GB; 7200 rpm; 2 MB buffer; SATA II...

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