I've used WD hard drives for a long time. I've used the RE3, RE4, and the new plain RE lines in my servers. Those drives have firmware that is designed for systems using hardware RAID. But that isn't necessary for lighter duty servers. For light duty servers the Caviar Black line has provided outstanding service in my light-use servers for well for over a decade.These are Linux servers using *software* RAID 1 mirroring. In this group of servers it seems like I'm always adding new boxes, upgrading or retiring older ones. My mix of WD Caviar Black drives includes ones that are a decade old and ones that are almost new. On the very rare occasion when a drive has started throwing errors WD honored the warranty and I got a replacement quickly. With RAID1 I can operate on one drive for a while, but I keep a couple of spares on the shelf just in case. For desktop use I recommend these drives for top performance from a 7200 RPM mechanical drive. They can sometimes be heard through a desktop case, but I see that as helpful - I know when the disk is busy. It's not loud enough to annoy me. For a well rounded mechanical drive the Caviar Black line is going to be very good. WD has consistently improved performance and reliability over time so I'm confident the next model will be better than the last. Read more
Ever since the devastating floods in Taiwan many mechanical drive manufacturers have been busy drying out their facilities. Believe me, I know how much work it is to get a class 10/100 cleanroom recertified and it will be time consuming and expensive. The supply of mechanical drives is becoming exhausted and the prices reflect the economics of supply/demand. For the SSD market, things could not be brighter as production ramps up, costs go down. For the end user the choices are fewer but better than ever before when making price comparisons. That being said we now understand why prices for mechanical drives have doubled in the past six months. Now for the WD 750Gb SATA III 64Mb cache: This drive is likely one of the best offerings from Western Digital. Why? Because it has a large cache, can be set up in a raid array easily, and does not tax the 2.0 TB barrier of Windows 7. No need for work-arounds if you want four or five of these in a raid array. However, due to current prices, that is no longer econmical. The larger the drive the greater the idle time power consumption and random read/write latency. Okay for yesterdays computer, or a data drive today, but not a good choice for a boot drive. Simply put, the WD 750Gb SATA III 64Mb cache drive is an excellent choice for data storage, has good response time and a good warranty. As big as Western Digital is, I have never had a problem with getting a replacment under warranty. Read more
Excelente HD lo instale en mi computadora que compre de Dell hace 6 anos y es muchisimo muy rapido y no hace nada de ruido, no creo que halla algo mas rapido que este. ademas de que le instale windos 7 y todo funciona muchisimo mas rapido, no le pide nada a una computadora nueva. Excellent HD install on my Dell computer purchases for 6 years and is a lot very quickly and does not make any noise, I do not think that is something faster than this. besides that I install windows 7 and everything works a lot faster, do not ask anything to a new computer Read more
Ordered late Monday, arrived Thursday along with 4 other components using standard shipping. The remaining all showed up Friday. As usual, Amazon did a great job combining orders and I paid maybe $30 shipping in total, for everything. I installed the following, and this part was compatible: ASUS P8Z68-V/Gen3 motherboard Intel Core i5-2500K CPU Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler (RR-212E-20PK-R1) Antec Nine Hundred Two V3 case Corsair 60GB Force Series 3 SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5 inch SSD Lite-On Lightscribe 24x SATA DVD WD Caviar Black 500 GB SATAIII 7200 RPM 32 MB cache OEM Corsair TXM V2 Series 650W 80+ Bronze modular power supply Windows 7 64 bit OEM Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 8 GB PC3 1600 mhz DDR3 memory My old WD HDD SATAII 7200 RPM from previous PC MSI GeForce GTX560 Ti 1GB DDR5 Twin Frozr II OC This is the OEM "bare" version, so it didn't come with any connectors. My motherboard came with 2 SATAIII cables though, so I didn't need them. Product works as advertised. Scores a 5.9 on WEI which is as high as a mechanical drive will rate. Read more
Great price and fast shipping Read more
I got this drive to place into a striped RAID configuration with an older, 32MB cache WD 750 Black drive. Functionality-wise, this new drive works fine. The RAID volume is running and fast. Like with most hard drives, you want it to "just work" and it does. Not much to say here. However, this drive is easily 3 times louder than its older WD counterpart! I haven't heard a drive with head seeks this noisy in a long time. It's not something I cannot ignore, and it's not the kind of sound you hear when a drive is failing, but take the "clicking" you heard on most drives when they're active and imagine them 3x louder. That's this drive. I'm actually going to see if WD has a utility to control the acoustic mode of the drive. I've worked hard to build a quiet machine (with Noctua fans/etc.) but adding this drive has just set me back in that goal. It's livable, but definitely not ideal. Read more
