Date: Monday, September 4, 2006
Author: Joe Di Figlia
Provided By: Western Digital
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Model: WD5000KS
Purchase: C.O.D. Shopping
Page: 2 of 6

As far as the test rig goes for the ensuing benchmarks, there is nothing over the top. The bench consists of an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, an AMD64 3700, 2x512 Corsair XMS Pro Series with the flashy lights, a Geforce 6800GT, a Silverstone Zeus 500 watt PSU, and some 74GB Raptors in a RAID0 Configuration. Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2. Water Cooling.

I wanted to go a little over the top with the benchmarks on this drive because I read a lot of the hooplah surrounding it. There were a bunch of talks about the performance of this drive and I think because of that hooplah, COD has finally established its testing procedures. Benchmarking will come from various software applications: HD Tach 3 RW, SiSoftware Sandra 2007, FC-Test (thanks X-bit), PCMark 05, and Everest Ultimate Edition. I have opted to omit Winbench 99 because the results were very similar to the NEWER software mentioned. All our benchmarking software is available online so you can try yourself.

I was really surprised to see this drive smoke the other drives in burst speeds. It outperformed the Raptors (without RAID) and even outperformed its smaller sibling the WD2500KS (the 250GB version) by almost 22MB/s! The Average read speed was only outpaced by a hair, being bested by the Raptors which is very impressive for a 7200 RPM Drive. CPU Usage and Random access times are right on par with the other drives in its class and the numbers are relatively comforting.