Western Digital Caviar Green 500 GB Bulk OEM Hard Drive 3 5 Inch 16 MB Cache 5400 RPM

I bought this 500GB drive last year of June or maybe July (I gotta check) and still kicking to date! Only to find out that 500GB wasn't enough! :) I got this for my first PC build that I'm using right now to write this review. It's a really great drive. Simple setup, just plug in the power and SATA cables and your good. No problems what so ever! Read more

This hard drive was purchased for our son's desk top which "crashed"...seems like the new hard drive is what it needed. The price was better on Amazon then the stores...much better. Plus I had a $25 gift certificate! I like that this is "green powered" saving energy!YEAH! Read more

Worked for me.Then it died about a month later. Read more

This drive (and all other of the "green" line) has a nice premise - why spin the drive at full rotational speed when most of the time it is idle or underutilized? Unfortunately, the execution of this idea is flawed. This drive cannot continue reading and writing data while the speed changes from 5400 rpm to the 7200 rpm tier, instead it halts while the speed is changed. This means that any programs that are actively using the drive cannot write or read to/from it during this period, resulting in some programs breaking entirely and things like music players either pausing or repeating their buffers like a broken record until the drive can send data again. I found it out when I was just streaming music off of the drive and then went to perform some more intense file copies - the music started repeating until the drive was at full speed and then it started normally. I've been able to repeat this several times so it is a flaw in the drive's design. Also my video editing software does NOT play nicely with the speed change, often crashing when it cannot read/write in a timely manner. Finally, the spindle on mine whines when the drive is cold like drives I have heard before with problems in the drive motor, and it is only 2 months old. Very disappointed, since the drive was cheap and flawed it's not really worth spending the money to ship it back to western digital under warranty, I have already replaced it with a Caviar Black that so far exceeds it in every way (yes, the blacks are a little louder, but still quiet compared to my Raptor boot/program drives and overall fan noise). Read more

I bought this not for the "green," although that's nice, but because I read that it's quiet. And that it is. I do not notice that it's supposed to be slower than my other drives, but I do notice that it's much quieter. It was simple to install into my G5 Mac tower, and so far does exactly what it's supposed to. Read more

Just let me say - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Even though I did not buy these Drives from this Vendor; I need to tell you that I have a stack of these Drives sitting in my Repair Shop from previous repairs. I'm seeing more and more of these Drives fail, or have bad sectors on the platters. I bought 2 of the 1 Terabyte versions to Mirror in my PC, and one failed within months; and the other within the same year. There Is NO Way I Would Ever Trust My Data On These GREEN Drives!! Read more

This is a great drive for storage given the extremely low price. It runs almost silent even when transfering files. The rotational speed is fixed at 5400rpm and does not vary. Transfering large files is faster than my 5yr old 80gb WD hdd but access time is slower because of the 5400rpm. I would not recommend using this as your primary drive to run the OS because of the high access time and slight delay when opening programs. Read more

I bought this to replace a hard drive that crashed. It has been installed in my PC for 1 month and so far all is well. It is quiet and reasonably fast. Read more