Thoughts on the Western Digital Dual Option Media Centre?

Karl Hungus

Namely, this fellow here.

I've been looking for a nice USB hard drive for a while, and personally, I swear by Western Digital hard drive, as I've got 3 in this very PC and never got as much as a hiccup from any of them, so I'm obviously going to go for Western again in looking for an external HD.

I noticed the media center when browsing overclockers.co.uk, and it really struck me as handy altogether. The built in hub is great for someone like myself who uses a lot of USB peripherals and fiddley gadgets, and doesn't want to be constantly messing about at the rear of his PC. But the card reader seems very interesting also. Now I really don't know much at all about all the different PC memory cards and suchlike, but I'm assuming this is used for the likes of flash cards for Cameras? Again, very usefull for myself if so, but any clarification on this and other uses would be much appreciated.

I'm pretty much sold on the idea already, save for information on the different kinds of memory cards and their uses.

So does anyone have one of these? Where would be the best place to get one? Elara are charging nearly €250 for one, which I think is far too steep altogether, and overclockers are charging nearly £150, which works out less, but after reading some feedback here, I don't really trust overclockers much.

Any response is appreciated.

K!LL!@N

Looks like a nice piece of kit.
I too swear by WD drives.
Wouldn't use anything else to be honest.
Have 3 WD drives and friends have WD drives and none have ever given any problems.

I don't really know where you'd find one reliably.
But i'd be interested to hear how you get on with it if you get one.

Killian

Karl Hungus

Another WD fan with 3 drives? What ones do you have Killian?
I've got a 120, 160 and 36gig Raptor myself.

I'll let you know how I get on with this definetly, but I'm probably not gonna run out and buy it ASAP, might wait a little while yet. Watch this space though.

K!LL!@N

I've got 2 x 80Gb's and 1 x 120Gb all with 8Mb cache.

Friends have similar and they haven't had any problems either.

Killian

Karl Hungus

Rather nice, Killian.
And yeah, mine are all 8MB Cache aswell, didn't mention that at first.

Have you the 2 80's RAIDed at all?

K!LL!@N

No i haven't tried raid yet.
I started out with the one 80Gb.
Then got a second but the 80Gb still has an old xp installation on it for my old pc and it'll probably end up back in that machine.
That's why i got the 120Gb.
But i might try it out.

Killian

Karl Hungus

Yeah, could be fun indeed. I've wanted to mess around with different RAID setups but I've not had the chance really, I'd love to try it at some stage.

K!LL!@N

K!LL!@N wrote:

Looks like a nice piece of kit.
I too swear by WD drives.
Wouldn't use anything else to be honest.
Have 3 WD drives and friends have WD drives and none have ever given any problems.

Killian

Way to jinx myself.
Just suffered a rather sudden hdd failure today.
My primary disk died this morning with absolutely no warning.
One minute i was surfing away, screen froze, reboot, can't reboot.
At first i thought it was the graphics card as i've been having a lot of trouble with it as it's old and i was using it while waiting for an rma to complete with komplett.

The disc wasn't even a year old, so needless to say i'll try and salvage anything i can from it and it'll be off back to komplett.

The really annoying thing is that i was going to be reinstalling xp on a new hard disc when i got my replacement graphics card.

To say i'm a bit annoyed is, well, an understatement.

Killian

jesus_thats_gre

Have 3 WD drives myserlf, 2 36.7 raptors and a 160 caviar.

jesus_thats_gre

I would also go for the 250 gig version, far better value for money.

Venom

I was about to pick up two of those 250gb drives when Maxtor went and brought out the series 10 of there HDs as they have 16mb cache and are 300gb. Ment to be almost as fast as Raptors. Guess I'll hold off a while and see what WD bring out.