Harddrive | Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive...

Adequately Packaged for an OEM Drive | Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD5001AALS

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	• Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD5001AALS Western Digital Western Digital average customer review:based on 397 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Hard Drive. Poor Packaging.

First off, all the reviews about the poor packaging are true. Amazon is really dropping the ball with how they package and ship hard drives. After reading the reviews on here prior to ordering, I opened the box amazed to find bubble wrap on top of my item. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to find absolutely nothing between my hard drive and the bottom of the box once I removed the top layer of bubble wrap.

But, for the money, this is a great hard drive. Western Digital is one of the most reliable manufacturers. Lucky for me, mine did not arrive DOA due to its packaging.

Bottom line, if you're looking for a great hard drive, WD Caviar Black is your best bet.

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Harddrive

Plugged right in. worked. Bought it for the cache size. its on a new computer and nothing on it so cant say much more than it worked right when plugged in and the computer boots up fast.

Adequately Packaged for an OEM Drive

Alright - took a chance and ordered the 1TB drive. WD has a long history of making some of the better HDDs in the industry. This review will attempt to address some of the negative issues presenting by other reviewers. First - packaging: upon opening the box, the drive was in another box which was surrounded externally by three units of air bags (strips of three); the drive itself was "suspended" within the second box by the plastic end caps that basically "suspend" the drive from any contact. The source of the shipping facility was from Lexington, KY.

Next,unpacked the drive and formatted to 931GB; ran Hard Disk Sentinel for a surface scan overnight and no damaged or bad sectors noted. Copied a couple large files to and from the drive with barely any noticeable increase in dB output (the drive I received is relatively a quiet drive compared to the others currently in the system; two other WDs and one Seagate). Actually - the loudest component in the case is the fan cooling the graphics card - this is an older Radeon AGP model.

I am basically confident the drive will last; notwithstanding the possibility of some latent issue that may pop up within the next couple months. This is a great price for the capacity (1TB = functionally 9.5 cents/GB).

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I have a question...

is this compatable with with an eMachine running windows XP. Im not sure if the current hard drive is a SATA or a PATA.

A Huge High-Performance Quiet Internal Hard Drive

This highly advanced and high performance 2 TB Western Digital performs extremely well so far. The most unique feature of this drive is the off platter parking and locking when powered down. With this feature, the platters are not likely to suffer shock damages from the heads pounding from rough handling while being shipped. Speaking about shipping, Amazon.com as well as many other online retailer should do a better job of packaging OEM hard drives for shipping. My drive was shipped double boxed with the outer box slightly larger with an airbag pillow on one end. The inner box appear to be supplied by Western Digital with two plastic cushioning inserts on the ends and does appear to be adequate. The outer box practically does not offer any more protection from shock damages. The outer box should have been large enough to be fitted with some foam cushioning all around. The other desirable feature that this drive has is that it has dual processors and dual activators for the heads for precise tracking. The secondary activator utilizes piezoelectric technology to really fine tune in on the exact track on the platter quietly. This of course improved performance somewhat.

I purchased this hard drive to use for additional storage on my computer. Because of the high-performance nature I feel this hard drive also makes an excellent boot drive for Windows. Of all the hard drive I ever purchase, it also produced the least amount of vibration when on. It's about as quiet as my Seagate hard drives. The only difference is that it makes the clunk sound occasionally when powered down when the heads park and lock. I'm paranoided from experience with my last two Seagate hard drive purchase that had growing reallocated section count shortly after placed in service. To make sure that I have a sound drive, right after installation I ran Western Digital's own Data Iifeguard For Windows to check for bad sections by running the complete surface scan. This software can be downloaded from Western Digital website. . I also ran a surface scan on this drive using HD Sentinel Pro. Both tests passed with no problems.

Final thoughts: Because this Western Digital is better engineered than any of my previous hard drive, my hope is for longtime reliability. So far I'm fully impressed with the performance I have been receiving. When I ran a benchmark, the maximum read speed was almost 140 MB per second and the minimum was around 70 MB per second. Take for example when transferring files from one hard drive to another. I did an experiment on copying files on copying files from my old storage drive to my new drive. When the file is copy single file at a time the speed remains almost full of around 100 MB per second. But when I copy two files at the same time, the speed chokes down to around 25 MB per second for the two files. I try again on copying two files accept at this time, one file gets copied to the new drive and the other file is copied to my boot drive. The speed also get choked down again to around 25 MB per second for the two files. This proves in a way that the bottleneck is on my old storage drive.

I tried this transferring test again except the new drive is the source this time. I copied one file to my old storage drive as well as copying another file to my boot drive at the same time. Only this time the speed remains the same on whether I copy one file or copying two or more files at the same time. The transfer speed remains close to 100 MB per second whether copying one file or two files at the same time.

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WD Caviar Black high performance 3.5-inch SATA hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 32 MB or 64 MB cache, SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and up to 2 TB capacity for the ultimate in power computing. Backed by a 5-year limited warranty. High Performance Electronics Architecture: Dual processor ? Twice the processing power to maximize performance. Colossal cache ? Bigger, faster cache of up to 64 MB means faster performance. Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture: Dual actuator technology ? A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy. StableTrac ? The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations. NoTouch ramp load technology ? The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit. Massive Capacity ? WD Caviar Black SATA drives are available in capacities up to 2 TB. Compatible ? We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems. 5 Year Limited Warranty.

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