I purchased the Western Digital 1 Tb Sata 6.0 Gb-s 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drive WD10EALX from Midwest Memory Outlet through Amazon. The drive was received within 3 or 4 days and was packaged extremely well. My original Seagate drive from my HP m9550F failed and was replace by the WD. The Seagate was the drive that HP kept shipping after a drive bios error was long known about. Information from the internet showed that lots of people lost valuable data because HP just kept shipping a drive with a known problem. Anyhow, I did get a bios update for the Seagate before it failed but it ended up failing anyhow.
The WD10EALX drive is fairly loud. I still have the drive located outside the case so that may contribute to the sound level. The noise seems to be from the head movement. The platter spin is silent. For the price this is one drive that is hard to beat and I am well pleased with it. My bios can't take advantage of the 6 Gb/s transfer rate but the drive is plenty fast just the same. I have loaded around 600 gig of data onto it. After around 3 weeks I'll assume it will not fail and put the case back together. If it fails I'll update this review. I noticed on NewEgg that a few failures were being reported. Not the long-term ones but the more likely out of the box ones. Here's keeping my fingers crossed. (Boot drive failures are a pain).
UPDATE:
OK. I put the case back together. The drive is not silent but it is pretty quiet. I can hear just faint clicks as it does its thing. Very nice. No problems with the drive at all. Recommended. Western Digital 500 GB Sata 6.0 Gb-s 16 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drives WD5000AAKX
My use for these drives is to replace a couple of aging five year old 80GB drives in Windows XP and XP Media Center machines. Those drives are still running fine, however, for the price, I had absolutely no reason not to upgrade them at this time.
I came across this drive middle of last week and Amazon was selling it new for $29 - I was scratching my head thinking "what's the deal" and "what's wrong with these drives"? Sure, even though they were above $25, Amazon was still charging for the shipping - so I took two to bring the per drive shipping down slightly. The old 3Gb version of this drive was selling for over $40 - so again, scratching my head about this. Maybe it was a pricing mistake? Whatever - it was a great price.
The drives arrived yesterday, same standard OEM packaging all of my six other WD drives have come in over the past 9 months. I used Clonezilla to clone the old drives on to the new, it went smoothly without any issues. I'm storing the old drives just in case these new ones have any issues I won't have to rebuild the system drives from scratch.
I know that the motherboards in my machines cannot make use of the 6Gb throughput, however, these drives are definitely faster than what they're replacing - older WD drives which indicate they are 7200RPM and 3Gb. Specs on the older drives indicate performance shouldn't be all that different, but it is, and for the better. I won't question it.
The drive indicates you can jumper pins 5 and 6 to limit it to 3Gb, but I didn't understand the benefit of doing it, so I left it unjumpered and it's working well.
To summarize - these drives are fast, quiet, and so far are performing excellently. I'm very happy with them thus far.
This drive would be a nightmare for the inexperienced, hence 4 stars. No instructions or software included! Had to download drivers and install a floppy boot drive to complete installation. Otherwise, the drive is quiet and fast.
This is not the "black series" as stated by the comment above. This is the Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALX 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive.
According to the Western Digital Data Sheet for the Blue Series Drives:
WD Caviar Blue hard drives are available with either SATA or PATA interface in a variety of cache sizes with a multitude of available features to deliver rock solid performance and ultra-cool and quiet operation perfect for family and business computing.
The Specs for this particular drive are:
* Model number: WD10EALX
* Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s
* Formatted capacity: 1,000,204 MB
* User sectors per drive: 1,953,525,169
* SATA latching connector: Yes
* Form factor: 3.5"
* RoHS compliant2:Yes
* Cache (MB): 32MB
* Rotational speed (RPM): 7,200RPM
* Load/unload cycles: 300,000
* Non-recoverable read errors per bits read: <1 in 1014
*Limited warranty (years): 3
* 12VDC peak (A, ±10%): 2.8
* Average power requirements: Read/Write 7.3(W); Idle 6.1(W) ; Standby 0.7(W); Sleep 0.7(W)
* Temperature: Operating 0-140(F); Non-operating -40-158(F)
* Average acoustics: Idle mode 28(dBA); Performance seek mode 33(dBA): - Sata - Blue - 500gb - Western Digital'
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