New Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB EIDE harddisk and Kubuntu Edgy

I have just bought a new Caviar SE 250GB EIDE harddisk. I am quite satisfied with it. It run quite and cool just as advertised at it's website.


hddtemp shows 34°C when it is under light loading while my room temperature is 30°C:

$ hddtemp /dev/hda
/dev/hda: WDC WD2500JB-55REA0:  34°C

It is currently cooled with a standard 5cm case fan. Even without the fan it seldom reaches 40°C.

Anyway, these are some performance numbers which is pretty average and definitely nothing near high performance drives like those 10,000 rpm Raptors

$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads:  174 MB in  3.03 seconds =  57.48 MB/sec
$ sudo hdparm -T /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   1172 MB in  2.00 seconds = 585.58 MB/sec

BTW, I have now switch to Kubuntu (yeap, I prefer KDE compared to gnome). I have been using many different distros in the past from Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake, Red Hat 9.1, openSUSE 10.0, then SUSE 10.1. All of them are uses Red Hat/RPM based package management. This is the first time I actually used a Debian-based distro. I have to say that I am pretty happy with its apt-get style of package management. It is quick and easy. To install hddtemp, I just typed:

$ sudo apt-get install hddtemp

and in a few seconds.... done. SUSE 10.1's zenworks is one of the things in sometimes pissed me off because it crashes as I mentioned in an earlier post and it is SLOW! it takes ages to load YaST especially when a new repository was added. I have read that openSUSE 10.2 has kinda fixed that but I was a little lazy to download the 5 CDs or DVD image.

Kubuntu is simple, just one CD installation. Compared to SUSE, the default installation package is somewhat minimal. My girlfriend complained that it doesn't have any default games installed(she likes the Enigma game and even downloaded the Windows port for her laptop). However, the APT package management make installing additional software a breeze.