I build computers as a hobby. Why pay for someone else to build one (one size fits does not fit all) when building your own is not too difficult and you can build with quality parts tailored to your own specific needs. Case in point, the WD 640GB HDD. Large hard drive prices are economical right now. Generally speaking, the larger the drive, the less the cost per gigabyte (GB). At Amazon's prices the WD 640GB drive was about $10 bucks more than the WD Caviar 16 320 GB drive with the same cache. Western Digital has recently color coded their drives: Black (high performance), Blue (mainstream) and Green (no brainer: ecologically friendly-for a hard drive). Where does marketing get these ideas? The Caviar 16 640GB falls into the Blue category. It is amazingly fast and quiet, thanks to its 16 MB cache and 3 Gb/s transfer rate. The technology is interesting in that WD utilized two 320GB platters which gives this drive an edge as compared to say 750 GB drives with similar cache size. The drive itself is nearly silent and the quietest HDD I have used. Its rated over 90MB/sec read and write speeds, which is very fast. Yes there are faster hard drives, but for the money this drive is an excellent choice.
My only complaint: the drive is warranted for 3 years not 5.
Amazon had the lowest price I found, and shipped the drive quickly. Turn around time from placing the order to delivery at my door step was four days. Stable, reliable and excellent price to performance ratio, this drive is a great choice for everyday computing needs. Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Blue SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AAKS
The hard drive worked great I had to go online to get the product manuals and purchase the cables since it is a SATA II drive and my computer supports SATA I it took me several hours to make it work but once I figured out how to slow down the drive with the jumper which was not supplied it was a plug and play process. Make sure you know your system specifications before you order and get the needed cables and jumper & Screws all at once.
The drive is pretty fast and allows for allot of storage room. Amazon needs to learn how to pack a hard drive for shipment! The hard drive arrived in a box with a static bag around it and no protective padding at all!!! My drive is warrented until 2012 from WD and it is already making noise upon spin up. So it looks like I am going to have to ship it back to WD for replacement. I would not purchase this item from Amazon again not because of the drive; but because of the horrible packaging the drive was shipped in.
Update 2/19/09:
Tried to do another exchange from Amazon, and here is what I got:
" ....I'm sorry to hear that you experienced the same problem with your replacement shipment.
As it seems that the problem with this item is more widespread than we originally thought, we are not able to send another replacement..."
Original 2/18/09:
The drive is a big disappointment. The first one was defective. After cloning my old hard drive, it worked for a few hours. Then the Windows became very slow and unresponsive. Windows failed to reboot, it reported bad boot sector records.
Contacted Western Digital customer support. Downloaded and ran Data Lifeguard Diagnostic per instruction. The tool reported the drive had too many bad sectors, also the write zeros was failed. Returned it to Amazon for an exchange.
Just in case my older power supply unit was the culprit, it needed a Molex to SATA adapter to work with the drive, I ordered a brand new 430W Themaltake PSU. After receiving the replacement drive, I first ran Data Lifeguard Diagnostic on it. Sure enough, it again detected the unused drive has too many bad sectors. When tried clone my drive again, it failed half way. Only one of the two partitions was copied over. I used Acronis True Image Home 2009 15 days trial version for the disk clone. Now, my trial period is about up, and I still don't have a working drive. What a joke! Also, the price of the drive just dropped by $5 since I ordered it.
It seems these OEM drive have very poor quality control. What is going on??? - Internal Hard Drive - Sata - 500 Gb - Western Digital'
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