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Using it as my primary, multi-boot OS drive. This drive is performing as expected.
I've never had any problems with any of them. I've tried many HDD brands and I'm partial to WD drives.
Only retired due to size. I still have an old 80 GB EIDE drive until I ran out of room for it and it's several years old.
No bad sectors and never a problem. Easy install, no problems.
Pretty quiet and would recommend Caviars to anyone.
everything came as listed. the drive fired right up. i have been using it for a month now and everythings great.would recommend.
I had to download a program, Partition Wizard, which after some plugging and unplugging was able to find the drive, format it and set it up. In laymen's terms it means that you are buying something that is designed to just be installed in a computer, likely as a replacement for failed hardware. Partition Wizard did the full format in a matter of 1 minute. That also means you won't get ANY accessories with this; no cables, no screws, nothing. It took two hours to fail at 8% and defaulted back to RAW; from that point I could no longer access it from Disk Management or CHKDSK. As a side note, I bought this to offload significant amounts of data from my primary drive, for archival purposes. Normally this wouldn't be an issue for a properly packaged item.popcorn or bubble wrap or inflated pillows, but Amazon just had this sandwiched, in its electrostatic bag, between two plastic holders and directly placed into the box.
I can live without the bulk of it, but a lot of it is irreplaceable and I would really rather not lose it.Most big name stores do not sell OEM parts. HOWEVER.be careful buying OEMs from Amazon. Places like Fry's do because they're effectively giant warehouses full of overstock. I'm going to just use it for a few months repeatedly, accessing the data and see if there are any issues, if not then I'll call it safe.Just be forewarned about Amazon's shipping methods with an OEM device like a hard drive that is sensitive to sudden shock and motion.
If you don't know what OEM is, it stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. No type of cushioning whatsoever, and it was not marked fragile. That was my first concern.When I got it home I proceeded to run Disk Management from Windows 7 to set up the volume and do a full format. Bad sign - usually means there's something wrong with a sector or even a platter. In the case of a hard drive, they are considered fragile as evident by all labeling on the drive itself; Amazon will not mark it as fragile on the box. Reads work fine, and writes are fast over USB/eSATA bridge, but I still worry about what might have gotten messed up over the shipment. If you understand that then this is a good deal. I ran a surface test to make sure there were no additional errors and didn't find any.
Amazon will sell you OEM, but their packaging leaves a LOT to be desired. That means UPS or FedEx or whoever is going to toss that box around like it's nothing. Instead of fully moving the data, I copied what was there over to the drive and then I've been moving some additional stuff that was never properly archived. The drive itself is solid, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about shipping it properly.
It's nothing like the drive that sits in my Comcast DVR that rattles away 24/7. If not, they are very cheap to purchase. Most of these items usually come with other parts anyway, like data cables with a motherboard, power cables as part of a power supply and screws as part of a computer case. That's also very important in the confined space of a home theater PC installed in a media cabinet.I've found WD drives to be very reliable and I hope this drive is no exception. They are both very fast.The drive runs cool and quiet. It also runs very cool according to the temperature sensor in the BIOS.
Plug in the cables, screw the drive into the case, boot up your OS and configure/format the drive. This is truly plug and play. You also don't need a cardboard box.Right now 320GB really the best value for the smaller size drives you can buy. It really doesn't make sense to spend a few dollars less and get half the space. This is an OEM drive so expect that it does not come with a data cable, power cable or screws. Before that I chose the WD32000AAJS. I notice no difference in peformance despite the different cache sizes.
It's nearly impossible to hear when mounted correctly in a quality PC case. I am using this drive in a new home theater PC that I built so quiet is very important. Whichever one is on sale is the one to get. Software isn't necessary because all the necessary drivers came with the motherboard for the onboard SATA chipset or with the controller card. This drive has plenty of room for Windows 7 and whatever applications I'll install now and in the future.
This drive and it's brother the WD3200AAJS are nearly identical the only difference being in the size of the cache (8MB for AAJS vs 16MB for AAKS). I found a sale and got it cheaper than the version with the smaller cache so that is the one I chose. I keep all my media on a separate server so there's no worries about running out of space. So far, so good.
The first HD that I received ended up being defective. Other than that, it was easy to setup on my Dell Inspiron Desktop. It was a very simple plug and play since I was replacing a hard drive that went bad.
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