2 spanky new 500gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS drives.

One high point of being jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, I had plenty of time to install my new drives. They landed on my doorstep at 9am Saturday morn, fresh from www.ebuyer.com, along with 2x Samsung SH-S183 SATA DVD burners.

For a while now i’ve been thinking of using up some of the many SATA ports on my motherboard, so I eventually bit the bullet after filling my 200gb disk with encoded movies and crap for my PSP.

First thing I have to say about the drives (hard drives that is) is they are pretty damn quick. They operate over SATA II (300mbps), but are backwards compatible with SATA I with the use of a jumper over a couple of pins (not supplied by ebuyer). The Windows Vista index rating for my previous hard disk was 4.9. These each score 5.9! Bearing in mind that 6.0 is the highest rating possible, is awesome.

So looking at my Vista score now, looks like the next thing on the upgrade list is the processor. A Pentium 4 640 running at 3.24Ghz just doesn’t cut it these days I guess.