Customer Reviews

WESTERN DIGITAL WD800JBRTL Caviar Special Edition Internal 80GB Hard Drive

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I bought this drive top add to my main office computer in a RAID system. There are 3 (three) 80GB drives in the computer and this one is mirroring the data drive.

SO far it has been 8 months and no problems. In fact all THREE are Western digital drives. The other two came installed on the system and have been running continuously for over a year now.

No, I don't turn off my computer unless there is a lightning storm!

I am happy! They are whisper quiet and very FAST! I heartily endorse this drive.

I must concur with the previous negative reviews of this HD. My husband bought a Western Digital 80G HD in spring 03 and the motor failed Dec 05. My computer came OEM with a Western Digital 80G in Summer of 03 and it failed 2 wweeks after the other one. Motor again. Drive had 20+ gigs of wedding and baby photos. Irreplaceable. Both computers were UPS protected and medium to light use. Mine was 100% original, used only for email and photo storage (and a little solitaire). No power robbing add-ons, no ventilation issues.

If your data is important to you DO NOT BUY this drive, and I would question any WD product if this is how they handle a defective product. I have no axe to grind other than the failure of these two hard drives.

For many years I used and recommended the WD products. I can no longer offer any such advice but would recommend that anyone looking for a quality HDD look elsewhere -- Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, Hitachi are all superior drives and far more reliable.

Both drives simply suffered meltdown failure of the motors, shorting out the computer Power supply until removed-- two different computers at two different times, both being used moderately, not "heavy office" or workstation use. Western Digital was useless and insisted that such failures are rare and likely due to abuse. They know that the 80 GB Drives are faulty and they refuse to "fess up." The government should order a recall and everyone should get a credit to buy some other brand of drive. Even when HD drives were delicate in the early 80's, I never had any just burn up like these bits of WD paperweights. My current favorite recommendation is the new Seagate 160 GB and 250 GB drives, fast, quiet and reliable.

I bought this drive and am just SHOCKED at how fast it is -- it's truly incredible. I'm coming off a 2 year old OEM Western Digital drive and windows xp was taking 2-3 minutes to load on my P4 1.3ghz with 380megs rd-ram. No joke, it takes 4 1/2 seconds to load windows now, I'm just absolutely shocked at the difference this drive makes. Blazing! Buy it, buy it...buy it.

I purchased this drive a couple weeks ago. The drive came with an install disk which made it fool proof. Very simple to install. Only time will tell how long it will last but I have had good experiences with Western Digital drives. I believe the drive is a good value for the money.

I have no problem so far with the HD. It seems to do its job well, and is quite responsive (quicker than my Maxtor). As far as the Data Lifeguard software...apparently due to some Windows updates, I am unable to use my PowerQuest DriveCopy 4.0 to mirror my old drive to the new (a "Disk Manager" conflict). I had to use the Data Lifeguard, and although it did fine, it created a partition that I did not want. It wouldn't allow me to change the partition sizes, or delete the undesired partition. Since I had to get the data copied, I had to go with that, and will have to address the partition issue separately. Anyway, I'm not too thrilled with the Data Lifeguard software, but the drive is fine. It has a very distinct (yet quiet) sound.

I have tried these hard disks working solo and with RAID, i didn't have any HDD failure, they are fast and quite. What kill's the HDD is the application you are using the HDD for like caching for internet files small size of files and lots of them, this is for sure will destroy the HDD, also there are two impotant things 1. Ventilation 2. Power failure these will reduce the operating life.

If you are like me you are buying this drive to replace a smaller and slower hard drive. So you want to move all your old data to the new drive and go on like nothing happened, right?

Well, I followed their directions on the Data Lifeguard product to the letter and when i booted up off the new drive I had lost functionality in several of my programs. After hours of struggling with it I gave up and just did a clean install of Win XP. Hopefully mine is an isolated case but it is not like I'm running some obscure system. I have a new Dell desktop running Win XP.

I think the Data Lifeguard program needs some work. Aside from that, the drive itself is working great so far.

I have had all three of my JB series drives fail on me. One or two might be bad luck but all three raises a red flag for me, especially since I have about a dozen Maxtor drives, IBM and Seagate drives, Western Digital BB series drives, and old Western Digital Caviar drives that have outlasted the three JB's under heavy use.

JB#1=boot drive in multi-drive system, heavy use, lasted 9 months
JB#2=boot and data drive, infrequent us, lasted 6 months
JB#3=data drive, moderate use, lasted 8 months
JB#2's replacement, has a "slow" spot that diagnostics won't error on

I will say Western Digital's RMA service is good, if you provide your credit card you will get a replacement drive to salvage.

I can only recommend these drives in a RAID 1 (mirror) system.

Dell Diagnostics Tools found problem in the drive six months from the date of purchase. But Western Digital did not accept that since 'their' Diagnostic tool did not find any problem. Drive developed serious problems in 1.5 years (this time detectable with Western Digital tools too).

Since Western Digital provides 3 year warantee (unlike Maxtor and Seagate), I got the drive replaced. They shipped the new drive fast. The replacement drive (refurbished) died in two weeks (!), resulting in complete data loss for me.

Of course, nobody takes any warantee for data, not even those who provide backup software that can fail to restore!

I have never used Maxtor or Seagate, so cannot say if those are better. Dell originally gave me 20GB drive (again Western Digital). 2.5 years old but works great!