Western
Digital Expert 27GB HD review
Posted by Adam
Klein on October 18, 1999 - Page 2/4
Company: Western
Digital Product: Expert
27.3 GB Hard Drive
Installation
To
make sure everything was going to work out all right with
the Abit Hot Rod 66 controller. I installed the controller
and hooked up my existing ATA-33 8.4GB drives to the
controller, so that I could get the drivers updated on my
system for the controller. This is where I had problems with
one of the 8.4GB drives. The one I hooked up as a slave on
the controller was prone to locking up on heavy transfers.
This
is the fault of the HighPoint controller chip. But, that was
okay, since all I needed to do on this step was to install
the drivers for the Abit controller. Once everything was
okay for the drivers, I placed the 27.3GB Western Digital on
the IDE 1 channel of the Abit controller and rigged up the
8.4GB drive that had Windows98 on it as a slave on IDE 1.
I
placed the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools disk into my
floppy drive and booted the utilities up that would help me
partition and do a disk to disk transfer. The utilities that
Western Digital provided are surprisingly easy to use and do
a really great job at what is needed to set a new drive up.
The utilities on the disk include a diagnostic program, a
disk to disk transfer program, a partitioning program, a
program that sets the computer up if the BIOS doesn’t meet
the needs of the drive, and a program to disable and enable
ATA-66 compatibility mode.
Since
I already had the ATA-66 controller, I made sure that ATA-66
was enabled. Since the controller can recognize hard drives
as large as 128GB, I didn’t need the BIOS setup utility.
The disk to disk transfer utility can copy the exact same
partition from one drive to a newer, larger one, then can
convert the free space left over into the same partitioned
area.
The
program did what it was supposed to do by copying over all
of the data from the Maxtor drive, but it took what seemed
like forever. I had almost 7GB to transfer over from the
8.4GB drive, so I guess it would take a long time. After the
long haul of transferring all the data from the first 8.4GB,
I decided it would be best to transfer all of the data off
the second drive using Windows Explorer. I decided against
hooking up the second drive to the Abit controller, since
this was the drive that would lock up when hooked to it, so
I hooked it up to my Intel controller that was on my Abit
BX6 r2 motherboard.
The
computer booted fine from the 27.3GB and in a surprisingly
short time. It took only 10 seconds to boot into Windows98
after the BIOS screen. I used to take double that time with
the Maxtor 8.4GB drive. Once I got into Windows, I selected
everything from the second Maxtor drive and copied it all
over to the Western Digital 27.3GB drive without a problem.
Go
to Next Page
|
