Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AAKX

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 1 x 4 x 5.8 inches ; 15.8 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00461G3MS
• Item model number: WD5000AAKX
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (121 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #3 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Computer Components > Internal Hard Drives
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 11, 2010

Product Description

Size: 500 GB

From the Manufacturer

WD Caviar Blue Hard Drives – Value and reliability for everyday computing.

WD Caviar Blue SATA hard drives deliver solid performance and reliability making them a perfect solution for both family and business computing.

Why you should choose WD Caviar Blue:

A wide array of capacities, cache sizes, and interfaces means there's a WD Caviar Blue hard drive that's just right for you. And because it's from WD, you'll have the confidence in knowing you've selected a drive that's truly world-class.

The original.
These drives are built utilizing the proven technology of the original award-winning WD Caviar 3.5-inch hard drives for desktop computers.

Value.
Built to the highest standards of quality and reliability, these drives offer features and capacity at an affordable price.

Ample capacity.
Store up to 500 GB of photos, videos, music and files.

Features at a glance 500 GB of desktop storage SATA 6 Gb/s interface WD quality and reliability

Ideal for:

• Family and business computing
• Adding storage in desktop PCs or external drives
• Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music

Features:

SATA 6 Gb/s interface - Twice the interface speed with backwards compatibility to legacy SATA standards.

Cool operation - WD continues to develop new and innovative ways to keep drives cool while they are operating which helps protect the drive and the data stored on it.

Compatible - We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.

NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Desktop / Consumer RAID environments - WD Caviar Blue Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications. (RAID-0 / RAID-1)*

*Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Blue Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD's Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

Upgrading your drive is easy - WD Acronis TrueImage, available as a free download on the WD Support site, enables you to copy all your data to a new drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to get all the benefits of a new drive. Note: Bare drive does not include any cables or mounting hardware.

The WD advantage - WD puts our products through extensive Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) prior to any product launch. On average, each new product goes through 600,000 hours of testing. WD also has a detailed Knowledge Base with more than 1,000 helpful articles. You can also call toll-free support 7 days per week in the U.S. and Canada. See the WD Support site for full details.

WD-certified packaging - All WD drives purchased from Amazon.com are shipped in WD-certified hard drive packaging. It is designed and fully tested to provide WD products with the highest of safety while in transit. With WD-certified packaging, you can rest assured that your WD hard drive will arrive safely, fully protected, non-descript, easy-open package.

Compatibility
Works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, Mac and Linux operating systems.

You might also consider:

3.5-inch Internal Comparison Chart WD Caviar Blue WD Caviar Green WD Caviar Black WD VelociRaptor Value and reliability for every day computing. Cool, quiet. Maximum performance for power computing. The fastest SATA hard drive on the planet.   Ideal for Family and business computing. Desktop PCs, external drives and NAS devices. Photo and video editing, and maxed out gaming systems. Performance enthusiast systems and workstations.   Capacity range 80 GB – 1 TB 320 GB – 3 TB 500 GB – 2 TB 150 GB – 600 GB   Interface SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s PATA 100 MB/s SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s   Form Factor 3.5-inch 3.5-inch 3.5-inch 3.5-inch   Cache 8 MB – 32 MB 16 MB – 64 MB 32 MB – 64 MB 32 MB   Limited Warranty 2-year 2-year 5-year 5-year   Highest capacity         Highest performance         Photo Video editing

Product Description

Western Digital 500 GB Sata 6.0 Gb-s 16 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drives WD5000AAKX

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fast, quiet, solid, February 20, 2011

By 

rsinj (NJ) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AAKX (Personal Computers)

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.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars WD Blue 1T Drive - So far so good., April 27, 2011

By 

Fred Wampler (Kingsport, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Blue SATA III 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD10EALX (Personal Computers)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars OK, but nothing special, unless you compare to Seagate, then it's AWESOME, August 20, 2011

By 

John (Michigan USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Blue SATA III 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD10EALX (Personal Computers)

It's a bare hard drive that arrived quickly from Amazon and well-packaged. I replaced a 500GB WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS with this WD Caviar Blue WD10EALX as the primary drive in an HP i7 desktop. This drive and the old WD drive show basically identical CrystalMark results, but it does seem to load programs and boot faster (I restored an image of the old installation to the new disk, so everything else is the same). CrystalMark shows that it outperforms the Green series drives I own by 20-30%.

I was looking at the WD Caviar Black drives, and saw some reviews that said they are loud, so I went for this one, which is advertised as quieter and cooler than the Black series and insignificantly slower than a Black. I don't have a Black series to compare to, but the WD10EALX is definitely louder than the 500GB Blue version, and also louder than 1TB and 2TB WD Green drives that I own. It's not LOUD, but it is louder than those other drives. It has the normal disk seek sound which is not annoying, but present in the same way the computer fan noise is present. If you are going for the ultimate in quiet, then this isn't it.

If you want to compare this to Seagate, then it is a 300 star product. I used to be a Seagate customer as their price/performance ratio seemed great. I got hosed by Seagate with a 1.5TB drive, the same one that everyone else got hosed on. They offered to recover my data for $900. I told them to stuff it and I only buy WD and other brands now. My plan is to use this drive a year or so and replace with SSD, demoting this one to backup. I'd probably try another brand at this price point if I had to buy another 7200RPM 1TB drive, but I am not disappointed in my purchase, just underwhelmed by the performance. It is advertised as being quiet and fast, but it is not quieter nor faster than the disk it replaces, hence the relatively low rating and minor disappointment.

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