The Hawk 4XL is positioned as Seagate's entry-level
drive, providing decent performance at wallet-friendly prices. The Hawk's Disk WinBench98
scores trail the Seagate Barracuda 4XL by a relatively small amount (by 8% in Business,
only 1% in High-End) while costing substantially less. The Hawk proved to be a little
quieter than Quantum's similarly priced and similarly performing Viking, but is backed
with a more consumer-oriented 3 year warranty rather than the Viking's 5 years. The Hawk,
unlike the Viking, came with a manual detailing installation and configuration. Even so,
the Hawk 4XL warrants a solid recommendation for those looking for an inexpensive SCSI
drive. Storage Review uses the Hawk 4XL as the boot drive for our SCSI test bed.
Western Digital Enterprise WDE4360-0007B2
Average Score
Business Disk WinMark 98 (KB/s)
1328
SS/Database
1136
WP
1646
Publishing
1258
Browsers
1538
Task Switching
1596
High-End Disk WinMark 98 (KB/s)
3410
AVS/Express 3.1
2254
Frontpage 97
3052
MicroStation 95
7016
Photoshop 4.0
2116
Premiere 4.2
6696
PV-Wave 6.1
2658
Visual C++ 5.0
7098
Disk/Read Random Access (ms)
13.1
Disk/Read Transfer Rate (KB/s)
Beginning
6860
End
6016
Disk/Read CPU Utilization (Percent)
6.1
Transfer Rate (KB/s)
7731
Western Digital's Caviar series ATA drives enjoy a solid
reputation of performance and reliability. The company is not one that first comes to mind
when one thinks of SCSI drives. Nevertheless, the company offers its
"Enterprise" series of drives. The Enterprise is a typical high-end offering,
backed by a 5 year warranty and claiming 1,000,000 MTBF hours. Despite its rather high
price, the Enterprise's performance is unexceptional, posting average Business Winmark
scores and the lowest High-End Winmark of the roundup. Like Quantum's Viking, the
Enterprise did not come with any documentation in the box, forcing us to go to the WD's
web page to find the correct ID and termination settings. Users will find much better
performance at the same price in Seagate's Cheetah and Barracuda, or better performance at
a much lower price with Quantum's Viking and Seagate's Hawk.
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