Western Digital 1TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD10EZEX

After upgrading my desktop PC with the Western Digital 1TB WD Blue internal hard drive, I’ve noticed a significant improvement in both performance and reliability. Installation was straightforward, and the drive was up and running within minutes, which is a big plus for someone who isn’t very tech-savvy. Performance: The 7200 RPM speed and the 64 MB cache make this hard drive quite responsive. I primarily use my PC for office applications and browsing the web, and I must say, the drive handles these tasks effortlessly without any lag. Durability: The no-touch ramp load technology that Western Digital boasts about really seems to make a difference. I’ve had to relocate my PC a couple of times since the installation, and it's comforting to know that the drive is designed to withstand such moves without risking damage to the drive’s recording head or media. Compatibility: I was initially concerned about compatibility issues, but the hard drive worked seamlessly with my Windows 10 system. It’s reassuring to know that this drive has been tested across a multitude of systems and platforms. Energy Efficiency: Another feature that stands out is the advanced power management. It's good to see that my PC isn’t using excessive power, which should help with electricity costs in the long run. Conclusion: If you're looking for a reliable hard drive that offers good performance and energy efficiency, the Western Digital 1TB WD Blue is an excellent choice. It’s suited for anyone who needs a dependable storage solution without the complications of a difficult setup or compatibility issues. Highly recommended!

This drive, this particular one, performs beyond typical specs in a variety of tests so for value/performance it has been a great purchase. Having been involved in both large & small quantity purchases since the pc level hard drives first arrived I can only say they have been a commodity item for at least 2 decades. The terabyte size drives have matured as we are moving into the newer realm of the multi-gigabyte drives 3, 4GB & higher at the consumer level. All the major manufacturers tend to provide excellent products as do some of the very small providers. The only problem that may come up with the smaller provider might be the sale of high capacity drives at bargain basement prices because they did not really meet the specifications of the original manufacturer. In that case reliability could be a real issue but you may get lucky and get one that stands out from the crowd & works really well. At those prices it becomes the luck of the draw. Also, to be fair, a major manufacturer can just have a bad hair day only to find a group made it out the doer that just don't really measure up. They often don't find this out until the drives start coming back having failed. Overall the chances of a defective drive made by one of the major manufacturers is just much smaller than one provided by one of the smaller companies. I, personally, use WD Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Maxtor, etc. and can say they all have had their good, and bad, days but overwhelmingly good days. Just really remember that heat kills so keep your drives as cool as you can, make sure your fans are working & the airflow is not restricted. Don't allow dust to build up as it insulates the drives & keeps the heat in creating a very unhappy drive. Generally if the drive is to hot to keep your fingers on it find a way to cool it down as it will fail much sooner at that heat level. If you have access to some of the software that will let you know the running temperature, of the newer drives, I use CrystalDiskInfoPortable which is free as one of the many free software packages found on www.PortableApps.com. While not a professional package it does let me know how hot my drives are running so I will know if trouble may be on the way. It also provides a great deal of additional information if you want more data to review. All the software on PortableApps is legally free & is part of the Open Software system so enjoy &, if you want, pass the word around. I hope Amazon doesn't get to upset over the posting of their web site but it is free & I have no interest beyond helping others with its posting.

This Western Digital hard drive truly stands out as an excellent product, providing outstanding value that perfectly matches its price point. The ease of installation was remarkable; it was a truly fantastic purchase, as the entire process was incredibly straightforward and user-friendly. Furthermore, the price is exceptionally competitive and hard to beat, solidifying its position as an outstanding choice for anyone seeking a dependable and affordable storage solution to meet their computer's needs. I wholeheartedly recommend this hard drive; it's an excellent option.

[ SEE UPDATE BELOW ] SUMMARY: (i) good performance as an external USB drive; (ii) internal temperature reaches the 95-105F range after several hours of use. REVIEW There are more than enough reviews of this disk as an internal drive. My interest, however, was to use it as an _external USB drive_, and that is what this review focuses on. The 3.5" WD Blue 1TB hard disk drive (WDC WD10EZEX-08WN4A0), has attractive properties for storage purposes: a formatted capacity of ~954 GiB out of its nominal 976 GiB --usually described by manufacturers as 1000 GB--, a 7200 rpm rotation rate, a 64 MB cache, a SATA III interface with a 6GB/s speed, and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. It is not the top of the line of Western Digital SATAs, at least in terms of the length of their limited warranty (3 years for the WD Blue versus 5 years for the Black, although there are claims of not too different benchmarks), but because of its relatively low price it has a 'drive value' index similar to the top non-SSDs. This makes the WD Blue 1TB a good choice as an external USB drive for the storage of media or data, in particular incremental backups (especially when disk writes caching is enabled), since top performance values are unrealistic for serving as a guide for external USB devices, where performance is primarily dictated by the USB specs and manufacturing compliance. The figure below shows results of a free benchmark app in wide use, Crystal DiskMark, for the Blue 1TB used as an external USB-3 storage drive (left table) and --to provide some perspective to these values-- for an internal SSD with a good performance as a system drive (right table) -- the latter, which was partitioned into two logical drives, has a capacity of 512 GB, and both devices are quite comparable in the fraction of used capacity, ca. 40%, which is important since performance declines as a drive gets full. The first line in both tables are the averages of sequential 5 reads and 5 writes with multiple queues and threads for a relatively large data block; this measures how quickly large files (e.g., backups or multimedia) can be read from or written to the drive. The second line are the averages of random 5 reads and 5 writes with multiple queues and threads for a small block; this measures how quickly many small files (e.g., when copying large app folders or loading programs during operating system startup) can be read from or written to the drive. The third and fourth lines mirror the above two but using only a single queue and thread. The lower performance of the Blue 1TB is only due in part to USB transfer issues; published data indicate that, if used as an internal drive, the values in the left table would have increased by less than two fold. Nevertheless, its performance is quite appropriate for external storage. I mounted the WD Blue 1TB vertically in a dual-bay USB3 docking station, and it is typically quiet but for some clicks when it starts spinning. A negative finding is its temperature after many hours of use: compared with a 2.5" WD Blue 500GB disk that warms up to about 24C (75F) in the second bay of the open docking station, the Blue 1TB gets hotter in the range of 35-40C. Temperature is often claimed to affect drive reliability (but see "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" by Pinheiro and co-workers, 2007), so I put close to the station a small USB fan with an adjustable speed set to a low value to keep it quiet, which brings the Blue 1TB temperature back to the below-30C range. UPDATE June 2017 Used in a new Lenovo E560 has worked extremely well over the last 6 months. The only issue has been that Windows (7SP1 Pro 64x) failed to recognized the drive as ready in 2 or 3 occasions only, and offered to format it; so far, this has been solved simply by rebooting the laptop. (This is a known but rare quirk of the OS, usually --but not always-- fixed by running the command sfc/scannow as an administrator in the DOS box.)

Great prize, works well, no complaints!

In 2015, I purchased the Western Digital 1TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive, and wow; this workhorse is driving away like a champ even after all these years. How many products nowadays can you buy and genuinely expect them to still work over five years later? Although it's an HDD that may not compete with the speed of modern SSDs, it offers phenomenal storage capacity at an unbeatable price. With HDDs, you are granted solidity and reliability, always crucial elements in handling data. As it was said - "Old is Gold." But bear in mind, if speed and performance are your primal needs, then SSD could be preferable. The major bell ringer for me regarding the Western Digital 1TB HDD is the excellent value for money. This budget-friendly beef of storage is perfect for those looking to get an enormous bang for their buck. The drive still functions exceptionally well, six years post-purchase, without any hiccups. It also offers valuable features like Free Acronis True Image WD Edition cloning software which eases data migration. It's also important to note that the WD Blue PC Hard Drive boasts a Data Recovery Service feature. In terms of compatibility, it readily gels well with desktop systems, ensuring a seamless experience right through the installation and usage stages. Remember that it's painted in this excellent blue, stepping away from dull, conventional storage system shades. In conclusion, Western Digital Blue can be your long-lasting companion for those seeking a reasonably priced, hardy, and reliable hard drive. This 1TB workhorse of an industry deserves its five stars for dependability, capability, capacity, and cost-effectiveness.

They were sealed in their package and new. Being WD I'm sure they'll be great otherwise. These are for replacement system drives as I always keep the operating system on one drive and have a seperate storage drive for everything we want to keep long term. That helps protect important data better. If a drive is going to go down, most usually it is the one that is working all the time....the system drive. If you just back that up every so often and don't store important stuff there, it's a hassle but not a total catastrophe. I just had to hijack a spare out of my system for my son's computer as his system drive finally went south. So now I have these as the ones we are working on now have alot of age on them- and when they throw a snit fit...no problem...we'll just throw the backups on these and we'll be back running again. I always implicity trust Western Digital for solid, durable hard drives....all the time. All my really important drives here are, in fact, WD drives. Stability and quality matters when you're talking about info you want to keep a lifetime.

I gave this drive to someone as a gift, and they've been using it for backups for 10 months without issue. My review is based on another unit of this drive which I bought for myself some months later. I've been using it as my primary desktop OS/programs drive since 5/29/2014, so it's about 5 months now. There have been no problems thus far. It's really quite a bargain for desktop use if 1TB is all you need. The actual capacity of this drive is 931.5GB. That's an old marketing trick which can be blamed for the pointless redefinition of all our real, long established data measurements with those silly "i" characters. I won't dwell on it any further, but 931GB is the true capacity when measured in base 2, as all data is correctly measured. This 1TB Blue drive uses a single 1TB platter spinning at 7200rpm. There are 2 heads (each side is 500GB). A single platter design is usually better for reliability than having multiple smaller platters, because there are fewer points of failure, the assembly is lighter, the motor doesn't have to work as hard, and less heat is generated. Single platter drives will also tend to be quieter, but due to my configuration I can't judge the noise level. There has been much discussion and testing among users in online forums, including WD's forum, which repeatedly show that the 1TB Blue and 1TB Black perform the same. It appears the only benefit of the 1TB Black is a longer warranty. Some Blacks are faster than this drive, but the 1TB model is not. Compared to a Green, the Blue is faster owing to it's faster rotation speed. The Green drives also have an "intellipark" feature which causes them to keep parking the heads after a few seconds of inactivity. This can cause laggy response and extra wear. I dislike that design - I believe power management functions should be left under the control of the operating system, which can account for user preferences and what is happening in the rest of the system. Hardcoding this behavior into the drive is ridiculous, in my opinion. The Blue behaves the way I prefer - it does not use "intellipark", it stays ready to roll until directed otherwise through power management commands from the OS. I wish they were making the Blue series in larger sizes - it seems this 1TB is the end of the line. I don't care for the Greens and the Blacks are more expensive. Partition/Sector Alignment -------------------------------- Please be aware that like most modern drives, this drive uses 4KB sectors (also known as "advanced format"). If you are using Windows 2003, Windows XP or older, as I am, don't let Windows handle the partitioning of this drive. This is even an issue on unpatched versions of Vista and Windows 7. These older versions of Windows will believe that the physical sectors are 512 bytes, when in reality they are 4KB. As a result, the partition(s) will not be aligned with the physical sectors. It will still work, but performance will be reduced. Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP and older do not have any update to fix this, but it's not a problem as long as you do the partitioning with a suitable 3rd party utility. I think Western Digital offers a tool for this, but I've never tried it. Once the partitions are set, it's fine to let Windows format them. For my Windows XP install, I used a recent version of GParted to partition the drive. GParted can be downloaded and burned to a bootable CD, or installed to a USB flash drive. Just use the option to align your partition(s) on 1MB boundaries. This is the easy way to ensure they are aligned correctly for the best performance. Then boot your WinXP install disc and let it format the partition that you already created. It sounds harder than it is, it's a minor hassle but it's simple. If you ever change the partitions, once again use GParted or a similar utility that handles alignment for modern hard disks. Don't use the built-in XP partitioning. But again, once the partitions are created, it's fine to let Windows format them. The built-in partitioning is fixed in Windows 8. According to Microsoft, it is fixed in Windows 7 after installing Service Pack 1 - you would need to have that service pack before partitioning the drive, not after. Again according to Microsoft, it is also fixed in Windows Vista *after* installing update MS KB 2553708 - I assume this is automatically installed for people who use automatic updates, but I don't know that for a fact. This won't do you any good if you're doing a fresh install and your install disc predates the required update. The partition alignment detail I've described above is an issue you will encounter with any recent hard drive, it's not unique to this model. If you ignore it, performance will be affected but it will still work. You may see Seagate drives implying that they are immune from this, but in reality, they are not. All modern "advanced format" drives, of any brand, will perform better if sectors are properly aligned. But it's not a big deal - just use a modern partitioning utility and then you're set. ---------------------- I just tested this drive using "Roadkil's Disk Speed" on Windows XP 32-bit. I'll cut out all the variables and just give the linear transfer results with large block sizes. My drive has a few partitions and there are lots of files on it, so this might affect results. First partition (first 20GB): 170-178MB/sec linear read 3rd partition (physical location range is from 28-628GB): 153-177MB/sec linear read Last 300GB is unpartitioned so I can't test that range. I don't think the random access test is useful, because my partitioning greatly influences the result. There's a test mode for the whole physical disk, but it's results are too inconsistent. This drive is a great bargain if you just need a simple, inexpensive, well performing 7200rpm hard disk. I was tempted to try a Seagate SSHD, but I couldn't justify the cost compared to this. If I was shopping today, I'd look carefully at the HGST and Toshiba offerings as well, but from the WD side this is my pick for a general purpose 1TB desktop drive. Update: It is now 11/2015. This drive is in my desktop PC, used daily, and still works fine. Some months ago I ran a benchmark on this drive using the linux utility "gnome-disks". The random access performance measured out to a 15.7ms average. This is mediocre, but expected from a quiet drive. Screenshot is attached. It also shows the transfer rate across the disk (read test only, I didn't test writes).