Western Digital Expert by John Reynolds
	Unfortunately, I couldn't get Threadmark to run while the drive was cabled to the Promise card, with repeated attempts resulting in nothing more than hard lockups. And speaking of the Fast Trak66, don't worry- there will be a review of this product running dual 9gb Expert drives in a RAID 0 array coming soon. Having been in something of a slump in recent years, performance-wise, Western Digital has certainly returned to its former game with the Expert drives. With a 2mb buffer, 7200rpm, outstanding performance, excellent heat and noise levels, and protected by a 3-year warranty, the Expert gets a strong recommendation from me to any PC owner looking to upgrade their hard drive. As a long-time SCSI user and enthusiast, the Expert is the first IDE drive that seriously made me stop and actually think about abandoning the high-end, high-cost world of SCSI for a simpler, far more inexpensive standard of disk storage. The Expert is indeed perched at the top of the IDE hill for right now, but COMBATSIM.COM™ will also be bringing you a review of Quantum's newest SCSI drive, the Atlas 10K, rumored to be even faster than Seagate's Cheetah, the drive that's been long-enthroned as the world's fastest disk. But for the vast majority of gamers out there, the WD Expert would be the best hard drive you've ever owned. Time, and technology, marches on. Click to continue		SIDEBAR from Western Digital At its fast burst data rates, Ultra ATA/66 will go farther than Ultra ATA/33 in removing bottlenecks associated with data transfers, especially during sequential operations. Ultra ATA/66 also delivers heightened data integrity to the EIDE interface through use of a 40-pin 80-conductor cable, and CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) error detection code. The 80-conductor cable reduces crosstalk and improves signal integrity by providing 40 additional ground lines between the 40-pin IDE signal and ground lines. The connector is plug-compatible with existing 40-pin headers, and the incremental cost for the cable should be minimal. As with Ultra ATA/33, CRC ensures the integrity of transferred data. Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking   HERE.
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