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New Hard Drive Promises Improved Data Reliability

Western Digital adds Data Lifeguard to new, inexpensive 10.1GB Caviar hard drive.

By Rex Farrance, PCWorld   

Western Digital, a familiar name in hard drives, has just announced an addition to its Caviar line of Enhanced IDE hard drives. The new WD Caviar 10.1GB has an enticingly low introductory price of $299 (after a $40 mail-in rebate) and gobs of storage space. The rebate offer starts when the product is available in stores, which should be by the end of August, and extends through September 27, 1998. By contrast, two months ago, Western Digital announced a new 8.4GB Caviar drive that cost $339--without a rebate offer.

Data Protection Is Job One
The emphasis with this new drive is not just on high capacity and low price. "We asked our customers what they wanted most in a new hard drive," company spokesperson John Burger said. "Avoiding data loss was one of the most important items on their list." To address the issue, Western Digital developed and implemented its Data Lifeguard feature in the new drive's firmware.

According to Burger, Data Lifeguard will self-repair potential problem areas of the drive in the background, moving data around as needed to prevent corrupted files and loss of information. The new feature is an enhancement of SMART failure-prediction technology and is compatible with disk-scanning software. "The problem with SMART," according to Burger, "is that its capabilities have been a part of most drives for years, yet the feature has rarely been turned on in the average PC. Data Lifeguard is proactive, protecting data rather than just predicting impending drive failure."

Each platter on the new 5400-RPM drive can hold an impressive 3.4GB of data. The drive has an average seek time of 9.5 milliseconds, and it supports the Ultra DMA/33 specification, allowing it to "burst" data to its 512KB secondary cache (double the size of the 8.4GB Caviar's 256KB cache) at up to 33-MB per second. The drive also uses second-generation magnetoresistive heads.

Drive kits will come with a three-year warranty and include the latest version of MicroHouse's EZ-Drive, a utility that can overcome BIOS limitations that prevent older PCs from seeing the drive's full capacity or, in some cases, even being able to boot.