Customer Reviews

Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS

5 star:		(206)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

I bought two of these. Just an insane price. Thanks, Amazon. The drives are bulk/OEM which means they come with nothing. Just the drives and the anti-static bags. Do your homework. If you want software to hold your hand through a hard drive install, do not buy this drive. If you need screws, rails, or cables, do not buy this drive.

If you want to save some cash while getting an absolutely absurd amount of disk space with SATA2 (3Gbps) plus 32MB of cache (older drives have 4-16MB), then get these drives. They are beasts.

After the Seagate fiasco, I vowed to go with an alternative. Western Digital came through with these monster hard drives. Get one. Get two. You will not be disappointed.

I bought this drive for my Mac Pro (Mac Pros, at least when I bought mine 3 years ago came from Apple with WD 250 GB hard drives). I have installed about 10 WD drives, upgrading this time form the WD 500GB drives, and this drive with its 32MB cache is indeed a bit faster (10-20 percent) than the 500GB. The ONLY downside at all to this drive is that is a bit louder when the heads are seeking, with the drive seek "clatter" more noticeable than the previous 500GB Western Digitals I just replaced (I needed more storage). Not bad tho--it's just that my Mac Pro is absolutely silent and I notice the least little additional sound and never really heard the 500's, the 1TB I hear now--but don't get me wrong it's not bad and there certainly is no drive "whine" when idling--these are quite drives. I guess whizzing across 1TB of data is a little more strenuous on the heads. I have bought about 20 Western Digital drives since 2000 and not one has failed on me--unlike LaCie--ick.

This is for people (like me) who've never done this before... I use Windows Vista and an HP desktop computer.

1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn't come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn't seem noisy.

2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won't support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don't get this drive.

3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable - 4pin/2x15pin SATA - 12in. This is a "Y" adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn't have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.

4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of "rail" for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.

5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.

6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say "locating... installing" or something like that.

7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) - Manage - then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the "drive 1" (or whatever) designation to make it "online". Then right click the long color band over the drive's partition graphic and start the "new simple volume" wizard. Stayed with the defaults.

That's about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I've error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it's doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.

I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don't know if this is the same on other PC's) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn't. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)


This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!

In all fairness this isn't a problem with the WD (although I did have two WD fail on me within one month), it's a problem with Amazon's shipping. Haven't had a problem with items that Amazon has shipped (but I have with external vendors) but this package was ridiculous. The drive arrived with two deflated strips of plastic. Even if they were fully inflated I would not be happy with the packing at all, not nearly enough. Funny cause when I order a pack of CDs they are shipped in two boxes with two levels of padding. Huh? The drive was also scratched up.. it was odd because the packaging though damaged didn't have any way to scratch the drive (cardboard vs steel, no match). I have a feeling it was refurbished or at the very least repackaged..

Do better next time plz..

First is of all, the drive is a good drive, however I have 2 issues with Amazon/Western Digital:

1. Amazon packaging of this drive is just terrible. When I received it, the drive was rattling in the box. That is unacceptable.

2. Check the drive warranty online as soon as you take it out of the bag. Mine shows as:

"No limited warranty - Product was originally sold to a system manufacturer. Please contact the system manufacturer or the place of purchase for warranty service. "

This pretty much means that Western Digital considers this a drive that you receive in an OEM computer (say Dell) and that the computer vendor is responsible for warranty.

Western Digital is known from screwing up the serial numbers occasionally.

For all that will criticize this review because it should be about the "drive" performance not other things, cork it! This is about a drive I bought from this page. What I received was a banged drive with no warranty. I cannot give it more than 1 star...

Extremely disappointed, the drive was shipped without and protection and arrived dead, it was packed loose in a oversize box.. When I opened the box I immediately wondered if it would still work..

You can check my history, I am not a complainer and accept this as a total loss. Not even worth my time to send it back.

I did feel that the shipper was negligent and took my time to write this review to warn other to take my loss in consideration when buying from a irresponsible seller


Regards
Eric

Amazon is shipping out this hard drive with virtually no packaging. My card board box was bent and few air penuts were punctured. I have been a long time Amazon customer but have never seen such sloppy work from Amazon. Highly disappointed. Do not buy this drive from Amazon.

If you happen to buy one of these drives made in 2010+, WD has modified the firmware to prohibit the use of TLER (time-limited error recovery) software necessary to use these drives in typical RAID configurations. Why? So WD can sell you their RE3+ (Raid Enabled) drives that typically cost 50% more. Drives made in 2009 probably allow WDTLER to work.

Another word on the way AMAZON ships these drives...I am guessing that these little boxes they come in are the way AMAZON gets the OEM's from WD, probably giant pallets of them. Then the AMAZON people see brown boxes that look like they are ready to ship, so they send them out just like that. If you look at the boxes, there are stickers on them that will have you think these are just little boxes that Western Digital ship mass amounts of OEM drives in.

NO WAY these boxes are ment to be stacked in a warehouse and shipped like that from these boxes, not with the minimal amount of bubble wrap they stick in there. THOSE 1 or 2 LARGE SIZE PLASTIC BUBBLES inside the box will be flat by the time it gets to you, and I'm telling you guys, if you think UPS or whoever is being used as shipper on these drives is being careful, your fooling yourself!...LOL!!!

Call Western Digital yourself and ask them how high of a fall they build these drives to take, or the G-FORCE they are expected to withstand :) I sent 2 of these back to amazon because of this "SHIPPING PROBLEM", and went to NEWEGG insted, at least they understand that it's not ROCKET SCIENCE. I called and BEGGED AMAZON numerous times to get word to someone that these things are DELICATE, and please, if your going to leave them in those little boxes that AMAZON gets them in from Western Digital, at the very least PLEASE PUT THAT BOX INSIDE ANOTHER PROPERLY PACKAGED BOX FOR SHIPPING. All my calls and all my begging went unherd, and NO ONE AT AMAZON would get word to the shipping depts. of the various hubs they have, that you cant have a hard drive banging around in a box like that when UPS or is throwing these things around the way they do.

I dont know about the rest of you folks, but let me tell you how I know when I get something at the front door from UPS....Take a book and throw it on the floor next to you, thats what I hear when UPS drops something off to me...lol! So, is it a surprise that you might get a DOA right out of the box?...NOPE!!! Should you be surprised if your drive works fine FOR A WHILE, then takes a dump? Shouldn't be surprised at all, not with the way AMAZON is shipping these and other hard drives.

Look at it this way folks, if this were not an OEM, and it was inside a nice pretty colored box with print all over it, AMAZON would take that box and pack it inside another larger box, but since they are getting these drives already inside a small plain brown box, they pull them, slap a shipping label on it and off it goes to UPS's soccar feild...lol

I love AMAZON most of the time, but this issue is really frustrating to me. If you don't want to take my word for it, then please call Western DIgital as I said. GO TO NEWEGG and buy your OEM drives from them, at least they wrap the darn things in 5 or so layers of PROPER BUBBLE WRAP. Otherwise, if you buy your new drive as an OEM from AMAZON, when it dies....DON'T SAY SOMEONE DIDN'T WARN YA :)

Amazon ships this with but two small bubble wrap things around the drive, allowing it to shift in box and hit the sides. The bubble wraps also apparently got hit with enough force to deflate.

We'll see how long the drive holds up, if at all--I'm still deciding if I should just RMA it without even trying to install. This is the WORST packaging job they could have done for a fragile hard drive like this. A box of popcorn from Amazon gets a better packaging job. Come on people!