Customer Reviews

Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Blue SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AAKS

5 star:		(158)
4 star:		(38)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

I got this in desperation when I needed a disc drive for my G5.
It has been months.
Not a hiccup.
It is very fast. Noticeably faster than the stock 160.
And it is very quiet.
It has increased my system speed and gives lots of room for expansion.
I am impressed.
Update January 2009. This drive is still going strong and works great every day.
Update January 2010. This fine piece of equipment has yet to have a problem.

As M. Mola points out, this is an OEM package. It not only has no instructions or software, it also does not have a connector cable, an IDE four-pin to SATA power adapter, or mounting screws.

If you want to replace a failed drive and don't want the clutter that usually comes with a drive, this is for you.

If you want to add an additional drive to an existing system, you'll need to get the cabling and mounting hardware elsewhere.

I bought this to replace the hard drive that failed in my imac. What can I say: no problems setting up, more space, pretty cheap - basically no complaints!

I got this Western Digital drive a couple of years ago. The drive worked okay for about a month, then the SMART info became garbled. I RMA'd the drive and got a replacement. All has been good until a couple of days ago, when it started exhibiting the click of death. 450gb of files gone forever. I am glad for the people who are having a good experience with this drive, but be afraid, very afraid and back up your data.

My 500gb Samsung, also purchased about the same time is still going strong. Unfortunately, it was not in a RAID configuration. I have never had a Samsung fail, so I think I will stick with them from now on. They seem to be more reliable, because they don't go for the cutting edge which this drive was at the time I purchased it.

It's a good drive so far. I have a Mac Pro and had two of these installed already. I was using them to store my movies and photos. Luckily I had them configured using Leopard's built in raid software where all the data is automatically shadowed to the other drive. A week after I ordered this drive, as an upgrade to another computer, one of these hard drives in my MAC pro, failed. Luckily, because it was in the RAID configuration, I did not loose my data. I've learned my lessons over the years and backup-especially of assets like digital photos is very important--I anticipate some disasters. The good news is, the drive was still under warranty, so I shipped it back to Western Digital and they send me a replacement the next day. I'm very pleased with the customer service and i've had many WD drives over the years and this is the first one that went south.

If you don't know what OEM is, it stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. 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. That also means you won't get ANY accessories with this; no cables, no screws, nothing. If you understand that then this is a good deal. HOWEVER...be careful buying OEMs from Amazon. As a side note, I bought this to offload significant amounts of data from my primary drive, for archival purposes. 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. Places like Fry's do because they're effectively giant warehouses full of overstock. Amazon will sell you OEM, but their packaging leaves a LOT to be desired. 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. That means UPS or FedEx or whoever is going to toss that box around like it's nothing. 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. 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. 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. Bad sign - usually means there's something wrong with a sector or even a platter. 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. Partition Wizard did the full format in a matter of 1 minute. I ran a surface test to make sure there were no additional errors and didn't find any. 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. 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. 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. The drive itself is solid, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about shipping it properly.

We chose to buy from Amazon instead of Newegg. The methods of storing/handling and packaging these raw, OEM drives causes a lot of DOA units.

Newegg (as of 8 months ago from this posting) still has problems with DOA units. I think Newegg may stack these and stress surface mount components, etc. No such problems with the amazon.com drives so we buy 100% of our drives from Amazon.

Pros
- Quiet
- Bulletproof (the AAKS) We have 20+ (now 30+) of these in Dell T3400 Precision workstations and put 3 in each machine.
NOTE: We have not had even ONE problem in 2+ years of NORMAL use - see 01/05/2010 update - (oldest 12/30 drive units are 2+ years old, others are 1+ years).

Cons
- None that I know of so far.

Did a lot of research on the platters they use on these drives and the technology. The AAKS seems to be the sweet spot in the line. AACS and AAJS were a bit different but not much. The WD5000CSRTL model seemed to have the most problems.

The environment these drives run are lab servers that are "ON" 24/7 so we don't get the same ON/OFF cycles that a home system would have.

Checking the hard drive
Run the "WD diagnostics" that come with the disk or you can download the utility from the Western Digital site to find bad sectors just in case you get a bad one (we never have).

This utility will run on *ANY* disk (not just WD). It may take a few hours for a "full scan" but it's time well spent.

01/05/2010 Update: Finally lost one of these 500GB drives due to a move to a new building. The drive was near 2+ years old. The head didn't crash and the drive spun up but Windows XP wouldn't recognize it so it needs some specialized software kung-fu to re-mount the drive. (it was a secondary drive -no OS). The data will probably be recovered into a 2nd drive. I expect one of the movers dropped this particular machine in the move (Hey, it's not a soccer ball, it's a hard drive, what do you expect?) Still a great drive for under $60.

I bought this drive from NewEgg because it was marketed as quiet. It's quiet compared to standard drives but compared to the Samsung SP2004C drives I own this is very noisy.

I bought two of these within the past year. They didn't even last a year. The first one started out Ok so I bought a second one, it was a good price for 500GB. Well, there is a reason they're cheap, because they are bad drives.

I've been using computers since I was 12. I'm 28 now, and these are the first drives that have died on me in all that time, (five systems and upgrades later). I always treat the drives very well, avoiding hard resets and shut downs and such. I'm careful, yet despite that both drives I bought failed.

The second one was never quite right, always a delay when accessing data. That one died first. The first one, which I thought was good, died a couple months later. I'm really disgusted with Western Digital. I used to buy only WD because I was satisfied with their drives, especially the 80 GB Caviar.

After this I will be switching to Samsung. The Samsung drives I have bought are quiet and reliable with no quirks. In addition, after the drive died I found my computer is responding better and is faster. Seems the drives were causing some type of lag in my system.

Western Digital seems to be going downhill fast. Avoid these drives and go with Samsung or Seagate with the five year warranty.

This drive is a bang for the buck! I just plugged it into my computer and the motherboard detected it immedately.Install Windows 7 on this hardrive was a breeze.I would reccommend this drive to everyone.

*hint* This is an oem drive,so be expected to not get a included sata cable and screws.The other thing that i didnt like about was how my hardrive was packed.Their was one airbag in their in a cardboard box, but it worked fine.

I've used one of these as my boot drive for several weeks. I've done no real testing, but it seems quick and is quiet except when spinning up. I also have a 500GB Seagate drive and the WD case casting seems better finished FWIW. The Seagate looks a bit crude, but performance is not an issue so far as I'm using it to back up the main drive. It will be interesting to see if the 5-year Seagate warranty does me any good; will I care about replacing a 500GB SATA drive in five years?
BTW, I'm being careful to back up stuff since the 160GB Maxtor SATA drive in my old Dell croaked and I had to send the drive out to be recovered.
I'll either buy another of these WD drives to use in the Addonics SATA front-loading dock I recently got, or will wait until WD comes out with a SATA/300 Raptor and make it the boot drive.