WD Blue 500GB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb s 16MB Cache 3 5

My use for these drives is to replace a couple of aging five year old 80GB drives in Windows XP and XP Media Center machines. Those drives are still running fine, however, for the price, I had absolutely no reason not to upgrade them at this time. I came across this drive middle of last week and Amazon was selling it new for $29 - I was scratching my head thinking "what's the deal" and "what's wrong with these drives"? Sure, even though they were above $25, Amazon was still charging for the shipping - so I took two to bring the per drive shipping down slightly. The old 3Gb version of this drive was selling for over $40 - so again, scratching my head about this. Maybe it was a pricing mistake? Whatever - it was a great price. The drives arrived yesterday, same standard OEM packaging all of my six other WD drives have come in over the past 9 months. I used Clonezilla to clone the old drives on to the new, it went smoothly without any issues. I'm storing the old drives just in case these new ones have any issues I won't have to rebuild the system drives from scratch. I know that the motherboards in my machines cannot make use of the 6Gb throughput, however, these drives are definitely faster than what they're replacing - older WD drives which indicate they are 7200RPM and 3Gb. Specs on the older drives indicate performance shouldn't be all that different, but it is, and for the better. I won't question it. The drive indicates you can jumper pins 5 and 6 to limit it to 3Gb, but I didn't understand the benefit of doing it, so I left it unjumpered and it's working well. To summarize - these drives are fast, quiet, and so far are performing excellently. I'm very happy with them thus far. Read more

I love Disk drives SATA for storage. I love ssd for OS much faster. The photo above shows how long my hard drives been on for 1 is over 13 years old the other 2 about a year. No telling how long a disk drive will last if anyone says they can tell you they are lying. I took out my older one and replaced it because the hard drive i took out was causing long boots and slowing down searches on PC but it is still loaded with things I can still use if I want it is far from dead It is a tad newer than the 13 year old. I only buy them when they are cheap and on sale because no matter the review you could get a bad one ..in my case been lucky so far. I grabbed the 2 Blue western Digitals as back up so no telling how long they will last. No One can tell me that. Hopefully my next motherboard board will handle 2 ssd and 4 SATA... Read more

I'm overall happy with this drive. Western Digital drives typically last a long time for me as long as they have decent cooling. I've only used this particular one for a week. As expected, no problems. Am reviewing it now because it'll probably be quiet a few years before it fails. I've a touch of buyers remorse in that the 1TB drives are starting to really drop in price now. I think they're the best bang for buck at the moment. Such is life. At least it's quiet. I'm typing this review on the very quiet office desktop this drive went into. I can hear crickets outside and a computer in a different room, but can't hear this little PC two feet away. Here's the build: Thermaltake Mini ITX Case ASRock E350M1 Mini-ITX Motherboard Western Digital 500 GB Drive G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333 Memory F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT random DVD burner 1080p TV with HDMI in and decent speakers Read more

This review is for the WD5000AAKX. I have an older version of this same drive, the WD5000AAKS. They are quite similar, but I found one difference that is a problem for me: The AAKX does not support PUIS. On many WD drives you can place a jumper on two pins, and if you then just plug in a power cable, the drive will not spin up. But not on this drive. In fact, when you use the linux command hdparm -I /dev/sdb, for example, the Power Up in Standby Mode setting is not even listed. It's not enabled or disabled; it's not listed. (If you don't know what any of this means, or you don't know why PUIS might be useful, then don't worry about it; in other respects this is a fine hard drive.) Read more

WD Quality HDD for when you don't want SD but need additional storage or replacing your HDD Read more

I've already had a Western Digital (500 GB) HDD installed in my PC (well it wasn't the same model but the same brand and capacity) All I can say is the item is very good from a very good company. Now between the 2 Hard drives in my desktop I have 1TB of space. Western Digital is a very good brand and if you were to say go to Staples to buy this Hard drive I doubt you would pay less than $70 for it. The hard drive is fast (for the price) and reliable. Also even if you've never installed a hard drive in your PC before it isn't rocket science and it is well worth it. So i would recommend this to anyone who's running out of space and who's other hard drive is about to croak. Overall I am very satisfied with this product and the price (i paid only $37 i believe) , the price is outstanding! 5 years ago this would've cost you $400 or more.Anyway like I said ,if you have ANY doubts about getting this item - DON'T! You will not be disappointed ! ! ! Read more