Western Digital offers a line of 2.5” drives made specifically for HTPCs, PVRs, surveillance video and digital signs. These drives use a 3 Gb/s interface, 32 MB cache and range in size from 160GB to 500GB. If you are looking for a 2.5” drive for your HTPC then the WD AV-25 line is for you.
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Western Digital WD AV-25 Hard Drives
The AV-25 drives are cool, quiet and draw less than 2 WATTS during operation! They also sport a whopping 1 million hours MTBF!
WD AV-25 Specifications
The AV-25 series has some very respectable specs for a 2.5” drive. This drive would be a great addition to a small form factor HTPC. These drives have the same latency as Scorpio Black drives and twice the cache!
Purchase and Warranty
The drives come with a long warranty period.
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I bought my 500GB WD AV-25 from Newegg for $60. My specific model is:
Western Digital AV-25 WD5000BUDT 500GB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal AV Hard Drive
.Newegg sells four different models so check them out!
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Drive Installation / Replacement
The WD AV-25 drive is just like any other 2.5” drive. Four screws and two cable connections was all it took to replace the drive in my HTPC. I use mine as the video drive where my WMC stores all of the recorded shows before it moves them to my WHS.
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The drive acoustics are less than 25 dB but I still mounted mine with rubber grommets to the metal case. Your drive may be quiet but the vibrations on the case can ruin the quietness of your HTPC.
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Check out these drives next time you are going to perform an upgrade or build a new HTPC.
Now We Know,
Tim
Most folks won’t get bitten by this, but keep in mind that this is an Advanced Format drive. Using it with any Windows OS prior to Vista will require the drive partitions to be aligned using the Western Digital Align utility. I used two of these drives in the IcyDock RAID enclosure as the boot drive in my HP MediaSmart Server machine. Performance was miserable until I realized that they are Advanced Format. Once I used the WD Align utility, all was well.