Customer Reviews

Western Digital 250GB EIDE Internal Hard Drive with 8MB Cache

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

The 7200rpm 8mb cache Western Digital JB line of hard drives are the best that money can buy. Though they run at ATA100 and not ATA133 like the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus series, the benchmarks for the Western Digitals are quite impressive in read time and transfer rate. Many of its competitors use a smaller 2mb cache (the buffer between your drive controller and the physical drive heads), WD's 8mb cache makes a big difference which can be proven by just comparing the 2mb version from the same manufacturer.

Reliability is a factor that is very crucial when hard drives are concerned. Even if you have a 3 or a 5 year warranty on your drive, if it fails generally all data is lost and it must be sent back to be replaced. In that unfortunate situation you are without the use of your computer for as much as 2 to 3 weeks waiting on an RMA. In the industry I work, we use many flavors of drives from 15k rpm U320 SCSI drives to all sizes of IDE. I have in depth experience with every brand available on the market. We have hundereds of each unit from Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Fujitsu, etc, and the best competitor on this market to Western Digital is the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus. We unfortunately have seen a very high failure rate among the DiamondMax Line, upwards of 10%. I have 3 large 2 terrabyte arrays built with these Western Digitals that come under heavy strain (approximately 16 hours a day of maximum reading and writing), I have only seen one failure that was fixed with firmware update. Firmware being an update pushed out to the drive to fix on board controller issues.

For more information about benchmark comparisons, check storagereview.com

I purchased my WD 250G 8mb ATA drive (WD2500-JB which is identical to the retail kit) about 2.5 years ago. It had dazzling performance and was relatively quite. Not unexpectedly, it would get quite hot so I mounted it in a temperature controlled fan based hard disk cooler. The HD worked flawlessly for about 2 years until the SMART warning went off. XP's built in scandisk indeed found one corrupted file on the disk.

I contacted WD for a replacement and it promptly arrived 3 days later. I installed the replacement drive and copied over my files from the original problem disk. However after one day of use the new disk suddenly, and without warning, made a series of loud clunking sounds and crashed hard. The computer would not even recognise the disk after reboot.

I contacted WD again and they promptly shipped me a new disk. It was a VERY good thing I had not yet shipped back the original hard disk as I was planning to wait for 20 days to see how the replacement held up. I installed the new "replacement for the replacement" hard disk and copied all the files over to it. I then ran scandisk on the first-original hard disk. It successfully fixed that one file that was corrupted so, in the end, I was able to save ALL my files.

In conclusion I am at least happy that didn't loose any of my important data. The new disk has, so far after 3 months, been running flawlessly and I can only hope, that "third times a charm," the new disk proves to be as reliable as western digital's past products (Knock on wood).

This high-capacity, high on-drive memory drive died catastrophically without warning after only three months of use. I had backed up the most critical data, but discovered that using any data recovery service completely voids the Western Digital warranty.

Usually, hard drives have on-board diagnostics which give you at least a little warning of a physical problem, but this drive's diagnostics did not warn me. Also, frequently you have some phsical warning of impending failure--odd performance, or lost files. However, sudden crashes like mine are not unheard of, just not right away in newer drives.

WD is a premier manufacturer, but my experience has been poor.

the warranty on this drive is one year...not three. WD changed it's warranty period a couple of months ago.
Despite reviews around the net this drive has no controller card as those shipped by WD after October.

This was the easiest hard drive I had to set up. It is so fast, I boot into windows XP Pro in less than 7 seconds. Its also big, and it successfully allowed me to copy everything from my old hard drive to the new one. And after I did that, I booted up normally with the new hard drive, with NO PROBLEM AT ALL!

Excellent!

Im normally pretty hard on my hard drives, and this one has past the test of time. On average with me it takes about 6 months to destroy a hard drive (maxtor). Went with Western Digital and its still going strong after 18.

Is it possible that this system of stars actually is being corrupted by rival companies' employees that put one star to every product of this company (even doing copy/paste with their reviews)?

I mean, I own a lot of hard drives (Seagate, Toshiba, WD, Fujitsu, Maxtor), some of them have more than 13 years, and none of them have crashed or nothing alike... Well, except one that took a fall from my hands.

I'm kinda suspicious, because with this rate of supposedly sucky hard drives (and the horrible publicity it carries), WD should have gone broke years ago.

Western Digital will not support your hard drive WHEN it fails. On November 16, 2004, I bought a 250GB hard drive. Three months later in February, 2005, I had to return it for a replacement due to a hard failure. Now, this replacement drive too has failed as well after only eight months.

I went through two Western Digital drives in a year due to no fault of my own and the hard drive failed just six days after the warranty expiration. I requested a replacement from Western Digital and they completely ignored me.

Buy at your own risk.

I've had two Western Digital Caviar Harddrives and so far both of them have completely died. Both suffered from problems with the heads and made a loud clicking sound before they died and lost most of their data. I got them about 4 months apart, and they both died a little over a year after I had purchased them. The warranty on these drives only lasts 1 year so I was out of luck and couldnt RMA. In fact, for both cases I was just a month or two out of warranty.
In my experience, the best types of drives are made by Seagate, IBM and Hitachi (who basically makes the same drives as IBM). I also have one Maxtor drive which is still running fine and one really old dead Maxtor drive. I've never had any problem with Hitachi drives, except once, but it had arrived DOA when I bought it and the online merchant shipped me a refurbished drive instead of a new one (the bastard). From now on, I will stick only with brands that have 3 year warranties so I dont have to buy 2 brand new replacement hard drives within a 3 month period like I did after the Western Digital drives died. They worked fine for about a year then just crapped out.

I got this item for my motherboard with IDE Master Drive for booting. Everything works without any problem. Works as advertised!