Western Digital750 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD7501AALS

The WB Black will almost never let you down, and if it does = WD Black RMA warranty works pretty damn well. I have been using WD Black some many many years, my main rig in old days always used 2-3 WD Black drives, that comes with 5 years warranty, they are faster on average 120Mbps read 80Mbs write, nothing bad for a HDD. In ten years I have bough at least 12 WD Black drives and only had fail me 2 in the warranty period, and WD RMA worked smooth and I received 2 spared that rocks some several years too. Actually I do use SSD NVME drives as primary OS drives, but for storage I still use WD Black, one of the best HDD drives out there.

2TB capacity, large cache, high performance, for under $200...actually almost $150 these days? Hard to believe.I gave it a try and bought 2 of them. They seemed good for 2-3 months, then I started to get SMART monitoring errors...hrm, ok well, they were in a s/w raid1 array and western digital claims the drives should not be placed in any raid configuration.OK - reconfigure the drives to run as single units and follow best practices/etc. Drive 1 dies a few weeks later. WD replaces it easily with a newer version w/ a much higher serial number (the original was very low so I might have gotten some of the first production batches).That drive is now running fine, w/o any real issues, although the SMART load_cycle_count has been increasing faster than it should which could be fixed for most controllers, but not w/ the 3ware JBOD controller I'm using. Hrm...well, it might fail a few years down the line and I'll deal with it then. WD does have a 5yr warranty.Drive 2 fails about 6 months after purchase. Monitoring picks up huge numbers of offline uncorrectable errors. This drive also had a very low serial number so it could have been suffering initial production problems. RMA'd easily. However, WDC sent out a "recertified" drive with a modestly low serial number and this drive is reporting errors within days of install.I have 5 of the WDC enterprise RE4 drives installed for ~6months w/o any issues (smart reports show wonderful health) and the only drives I've had issues with are the caviar blacks which are tending towards 150% failure rate... I'm going to try upgrading the SATA cable of the current problematic drive.Going forward, for WDC SATA, I'll only be buying the RE4's. No more caviar black.

Enough of the other reviewers have provided information about ease of use, what comes in the box, how to set them up, and debated the various merits of Western Digitals reliability and customer service that I feel no need to restate my own thoughts and opinions on those matters.I purchased these drives to increase the storage space in my home office media server (Dell PowerEdge, 3.0Ghz HT, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, PCI/e SATA II RAID controller). Before selecting a final RAID configuration I did extensive testing of these drives to determine read performance (write isn't that much of an issue when streaming video and music to various locations) and here are the results of those tests.The "control" group was the PowerEdge's two 360GB WD green drives configured in RAID 1 (disk mirroring) (the OS drive is a pair of EIDE 10GB drives in RAID 1). These results are the average of four passes with HD Tune.Control:RAID/Space/Max Read (MB/s)/AVG Read (MB/s)/CPU1 / 360GB / 99.6 / 76 / 2.1%1TB WD Black drivesRAID/Space/Max Read (MB/s)/AVG Read (MB/s)/CPU0 / 4 TB / 205.3 /168.8 / 6.1%1 / 2 TB / 108.6 / 86.3 / 2.9%0-1 / 2 TB / 207.3 /168.6 / 6.5%5 / 3 TB / 233.0 / 205.9 / 8.6%Comparing "apples to apples" in a RAID 1 configuration the 1TB WD Black drives are noticeably faster than the smaller Green drives. I was rather surprised that the RAID 5 configuration scored so much faster than the RAID 0-1 configuration and in the end I went with the RAID5 configuration as it gave me the best "bang for the buck" (reliability, speed, and available space).Prior to implementing RAID5 with these drives on the server the average transfer rate from the WD Green drives to my laptop via 802.11g router was 1.8MB/s (this was tested using large audio and media files). With that same router I am now seeing 4.6MB/s (roughly 42Mbs), which is near enough to the theoretical limit of 54Mbs on the router that I suspect the reason it isn't faster are due to limitations of the router. Doing hardwired tests (plugging the laptop into the 100Mbs ports on the router via a network cable) would seem to confirm this as the transfer rate improved from 1.9MB/s to 10.3MB/s.

The drive seemed OK to start with although it wasn't as fast as I had hoped. However, 10 months later, I returned it to WD, due to mounting and writing issues and noise (and it appeared to be unrepairable with the usual software). I noticed that their returns/repair info say that a reconditioned drive may be issued in return, plus I had to pay the postage. Keep the box, packaging and electrostatic bag if you buy one because WD require drives to be properly packaged if returned. Update - WD have sent me a new drive, 2 weeks later, so their warranty service has been good and it was easy to use via their web site. The new one is running well and is very quiet after the initial start-up.

WD Caviar Black 1TBFast, reliable & noisy (vibrates).Noisy in a case with no isolation material on the fixings.

Received with thanks

BEST Hard Disk Drive you can ever buy. I got 6 of them. Never had a problem and works a treat.

Not much to say, as the disc just worked "out of the box". Installation was very easy (XP Pro), and I've now got rather more space in which to expand my ever-growing photographic collection!