The WD 27.3GB has been popular lately around the Internet. I bought my 27.3GB drive a couple of weeks ago to replace my sluggish and much smaller 8.4GB Maxtor drive, but this review hasn’t gone live until about 4 other reviews of this same drive have popped up all over the internet.

This drive is simply amazing when it comes to performance and is monstrous when it comes to storage capacity. It is, however, a little pricey.

When I got this drive a couple o weeks ago it cost me $320 and that is without the ATA-66 controller I bought 3 days prior to receiving the drive. For this drive, I selected the Abit Hot Rod 66 controller. The Abit version of the ATA-66 controller uses the popular HighPoint controller chip. While this controller chip is awesome at delivering performance, I did find that it was not 100% compatible with other drives.

The Western Digital 27.3GB drive had no problem with the controller at all, while the 8.4GB Maxtor drive I had hooked up to the controller locked up on some heavy file transfers.

Impressions

I think the main thing that drew me into buying this drive was the speed improvement that I would see over my 8.4GB drive. With my Celeron 550MHz, TNT2 Ultra and 224MB of RAM, the only thing that was holding me back was the slow performance from the two 8.4GB Maxtor drives.

The outside of the WD 27.3GB drive looks very similar to that of IBM drives. This is because Western Digital licensed a lot of IBM’s drive technology. This is good for Western Digital, IBM and for us.

Western Digital Drives are available almost everywhere, while IBM drives are not and IBM drives, in the past, were the fastest drives around. Now, when you buy a Western Digital drive you can expect to see performance near that of IBMs and that is what I expected from my 27.3GB Western Digital drive.

 

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