Customer Reviews

Western Digital 250 GB Caviar Blue 100 Mb/s 7200 RPM 8 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD2500AAJB

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This drive is exactly as advertised. It is a bare drive, no cables or mounting gear included (although you probably don't need either). It does not include instructions either; so you should know what you are doing if you are buying this hardware. It is an excellent choice for an older computer.

I bought this hard drive 7 months ago and I'm using it as a USB storage, I use it everyday for data storage and never had problems, I'm planning to upgrade to 1 TB next month.

I'm using this as a second hard drive in my desktop Macintosh. The drive has a sturdy feel to it. I've handled a lot of drives and this one is quite heavy when compared to the other drives I have used. I've had it in everyday use for over a month now and have had no problems at all and I don't expect any.
This drive is a good value. When used on a mac you simply plug it in, and turn it on. Then use disk utility in the utilities fold to format the disk and your in business.

Everything about the item was excellent. Well packaged, quickly shipped, performs well upon installation. My only problem was upon ordering, the product description said the drive was available in both PATA and SATA configurations(parallel vs. serial). My older computer required the PATA as a replacement hard drive. The Amazon ordering process did not facilitate the specifying of one of the two available configurations. It took various phone calls to Amazon, and emails to the product supplier to assure me the PATA version would be shipped. It turned out well, but this was the first time I encountered ambiguity, frustration, and delay in placing an order with Amazon.com

Item # B000VRZ7PA Western Digital Caviar Blue PATA Hard Drive WD1600AAJB

I ordered this through Amazon Market Place, because by the time I was ready to order it, Amazon was sold-out for the time being. Now it's re-stocked and I'm seriously considering ordering another. Unlike the display pages, this unit is bulk-OEM which came in a plasti-foil/mylar sealed wrapper. (no directions)

The re-seller did an excellent job bubble-wrapping it for shipping and when I contacted them about specifications, they were helpful and informative. Pricing was competitive with Amazon's own department. This drive is a little noisier than my original drive, which featured a peculiar rubber sheath. But this little winder spins out a fast 7200 RPM, and the noise isn't anything approaching noise from the power-supply cooling fan.

The Western Digital web-site features full specifications pages which are model specific. And there's a frequently asked questions (FAQ) menu with lots of information, some of which may apply to your needs. They also illustrated precisely the jumper settings configuration table I was looking for.

If you're installing an Operating System, (this installation was Windows XP) your installation disk will perform the necessary format. Because mine was XP, it had the option of selecting either FAT-32 file system (backwards compatible Windows 95-98) or NTFS file system, which is upwards compatible with Windows Vista & Windows 7, in case you need to network and share files.

I don't upgrade my computers nearly as often as the average person. I use it for general use and don't have a gazillion programs demanding a ton of resources. And I don't download everything I see on the internet. So I don't have the need for a huge HD. I just recently upgraded to this 160 GB drive from the 40 GB one that came with this Dell Dimension 3000 that I'm happy to say I've had for many years now. It runs faster and is quieter than my old HD. I don't know what else can be said. I like it.

Western Digital is the only company I trust when it comes to HD's. They are tanks. I've never had a problem with one nor seen anybody who has. This doesn't hold true with Maxtor or Seagate. I've seen problems with both. To me durability is priority #1. When I buy something I want it to last, because I don't upgrade often. I plan on using XP Pro until they stop supporting it, and also just upgraded from 512 MB of ram to 1 GB. I know, the horror! And you know what?... my PC is greased lightning. It's how you use what you've got that's important.

And yes, we ARE still talking about computers here ;)

I purchased this hard drive to replace the 60GB hard drive in my HP Pavilion 742n purchased back in 2002. There was nothing wrong with the old hard drive and it had alot of free space left. The HP system recovery is on the D partition of the hard drive, and not on seperate CDs. If the hard drive did go South, I would have to purchase another operating system. I intended to install the WD hard drive and keep the old one as a back up in the event I needed to re-install the operating system.
As stated, this is a bulk OEM package. All you get is the hard drive, no cables or attaching screws.
I've been in the computer case before to clean out the dust bunnies from the cooling fans, upgrade the memory, and replace the CD writer with a DVD burner. This seemed to be a little more involved and made me a little anxious. In the end, it turned out to be very easy.
The ribbon cable connected to the hard drive had provisions to connect two devices. The connectors were clearly marked with "primary" and "slave." I left the jumper settings on both hard drives to "cable select" and connected the WD hard drive to the "slave" connector. There is a diagram printed on the hard drive showing the jumper settings for the different configurations. I did alot of research beforehand on cloning software and decided to just use the Acronis cloning software available from the WD website. The cloning software will only work if it detects a WD component. It was easy to use and pretty much self explanatory. Once the cloning was done, I removed the old hard drive and attached the WD hard drive to the primary connector.
The computer booted right up without any problems. I decided to test out the HP system recovery (pressing F10 when you see the blue HP logo) and it didn't boot into the HP system recovery. It just rebooted back to Windows.
From what I could determine, it has to do with the partition configuration, which I haven't quite figured out yet, and frankly don't have any plans to at this point.
When you do a system recovery, the computer reverts to as it was out of the box, with all the annoying programs that it came with and none of the programs you installed. I have everything set up just like I want it on the old hard drive. If anything should happen, I can just use it to re-install everything.
The hard drive is very quiet, in fact, I can't even hear it!
All in all, I think this a great product at a very reasonable price and a great way to update an older computer.

I purchased this drive to replace the existing 80GB Western Digital hard drive on my Dell Dimension 4600, which had failed after 5 years of hard service. This drive from Amazon.com arrived earlier than estimated, in secure packaging, and installed easily (I had a buddy of mine who helped me install it and install Windows). Runs quietly, and somehow the computer seems to run much faster than when we were using the 80GB WD. I'm now in the market to get another of these drives as a secondary on this computer. I'm a happy customer!

I installed this disk on a dell XPS, 3GHz, 2GB memory. The machine is 6 years old and it was about time to replace the original disk. The installation went smoothly using Apricorn EZ Gig II software. I have three bays with two disks so the actual physical switching was kept to a minimum. I have had no trouble with this disk since I installed it and it sure runs faster than the old one which was very busy recovering errors.

What can I say, the drive works fine and is nice and quiet.
had no problem setting it up, except there was an 8g partition I couldn't figure out what it was, but after the second try I was able to get rid of it. After that it was a breeze. the thing is fairly fast and works great.