# Wd5000aaks 500gb



## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Has anyone tried this new WD 500 GB drive? I read that it has 3 platters instead of the 4 platters the previous drives had. I'm curious if it is just as quiet.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Well I got the drive. It doesn't have the legacy connector and the Hitachi tools shows that it doesn't support acoustic or power management. I'll try it anyway to see how it works. It seems like a cheaper manufactured drive. Hopefully WD will replace my RE2 drive so I'll have the option to replace the 5000AAKS if it is louder. I guess I can just copy from one drive to the other. This one is going in an S3 that's in my bedroom so it needs to at leasrt be as quiet as the RE2 models.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

This drive is definitely noiser than the other drives. Too much noise for my bedroom. Without the capability to enable acoustic management it is just too noisy. Now it's not as much noise as a Maxtor drive without AM enabled but it is too loud for me in the bedroom. I could deal with it if it was in the S3 in my Computer room but I should have just waited for the RE2 drive. I replace it with that assuming WD replaces my drive. 
So stay away from the WD5000AAKS 500GB drive for use in the TiVo.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

It is running two degrees cooler with the 5000AAKS drive than with the stock drive. There also isn't much noise when only recording one channel. But recording two channels and watching a recorded show bring sthe noise level up.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Hmm. I just connected my 5000AAKS again, but this time it is the master drive. I have it set to copy the 500GB drive to my replacement 5000YS drive that WD sent me. But I noticed now in the Hitachi tools it is showing that the drive does have Acoustic Managemnet. I don't know why it didn't show this before. the only difference was the first time it was set as the slave. So I guess I could have kept this drive. After enabling AM it is noticebly quieter and it does run slightly cooler than the YS drive. But I've already opened up the YS package so I'm going to just proceed with making a copy of the AAKS drive.
So I don't know what happened but the AAKS does have acoustic management, larger platters and runs slightly cooler. Hopefully the copy process will owrk properly. My other copies were used on the same ide channel. This time I tried it with both drives as the master on each channel since I'm hoping that will speed it up since with both on the same channel with the old pC I'm using for this would probably take over 5 hours. I'm hoping that this will shave an hour off the copy time, but I have no way of knowing until the end. If I go through the process of finding out it will just slow down the copy process since it has to access the CD rom alot taking up bandwidth.


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## Thos19 (Dec 31, 2002)

I bought the same model drive during the MicroCenter price mistake fiasco a couple of weeks ago (an online coupon allowed you to buy the drive for $59.99 rather than $159.99).

I was able to change the acoustic management setting to 128, and then successfully restored my Series 3 image to it on Monday. Everything works great thus far, and it is as quiet as the original stock drive.

Thos.


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