Customer Reviews

Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Blue SATA III 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD10EALX

5 star:		(88)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

We have a Windows XP PC with 250GB hard drive that was getting full with photos and videos. We therefore ordered this inexpensive upgrade to triple the capacity to 750GB total. We ordered the same Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive as the original since our old drive has been quite reliable over the past 4 years. [Western Digital also makes Green drives that are cooler and quieter, but supposedly not so reliable; and Black drives for gaming performance that we didn't need.] The new 500GB hard drive, as stated, is "bare". That means 2 cables are needed along with it - a data cable, and a power cable. We found this out by contacting Western Digital Tech Support who were quite helpful. We ordered these cables from amazon.com as well: B0001Y8UI4, and B00009YFTI. The ambition was to do this at home; but realized upon opening the PC box that it wasn't so easy - the connections were not easy to figure out including jumper to lower the speed of the new drive from 6Gb/s to 3Gb/s - that Western Digital had warned us about to be compatible with the older PC. Fortunately, a local computer repair shop agreed to do it for only $50 [the same components purchased from them would have been twice as much as amazon.com!] as opposed to Best Buy Geek Squad that wanted over $200 for the same labor. Now, the programs are on the old hard drive [C:] and the data is on this new drive [E:]. The hardware is not a problem; it is working fine as it should. The problem is with software handling the transition of the data. The document folders were an easy fix - change designation from C: to E: for each user. But some programs have been a pain: For example, iTunes had to be directed to E: drive and in the process of rebuilding its library, duplicated all files and also lost the playlists. It is now a headache to manually fix 200GB of iTunes library data since, as we all have experienced, there is no support when it comes to software [Help forums haven't responded]. But I believe we are good to go for another few years after this.

This hard drive is the best mid-range hard drives out there. We run a computer repair shop and THIS is the drive that we always use as a replacement in customers computers.

For 500GB, you just can't beat the price. In my 15 years of business I have seen a few hard drive companies come and go, rise and fall. Maxtor was the beast hard drive of all time (until Seagate bought and crushed them). Now, Western Digital holds the best drive, as Maxtor once did.

If you are looking for a great all around basic hard drive, then this is for you. If you are looking for speed and performance such as needed with a "gaming rig" then choose Western Digital BLACK series.

I purchased several of these drives to use as spares for servers that had the previous generation SATA II 3.0 Gb/sec WD3200AAKS drive. Well as luck would have it, I've had some failures of those old ones and went to replace them, only this drive was not recognized by the computer. After a day of digging, turns out there is a buggy Intel SATA II controller out there in many makes and models of computers that does not properly interact with this particular drive, causing the drive to remain at the 6.0 Gb/sec interface speed and the controller at 3.0 Gb/sec; i.e. no communication possible.

The fix is to place a jumper across pins 5 and 6 which will force the drive to SATA II speeds and make it show up. Unfortunately it doesn't come with any jumpers, so hopefully you have an old computer lying around you can steal one out of.

The same article on WD's site that gave me the fix also said it was possible to perform this fix using a software program they offer called WDSpeed but they refused to give me a copy for some reason and said I had to go buy some jumpers.

I purchased a 500GB unit since I don't really need much storage. I simply REPLACED my older 160GB Hitachi with this newer 500GB WD drive. Since installation, the average temperature on my multiple-core microprocessor has risen at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit so this drive runs significantly hotter than the Hitachi. In warmer environments, this emission of heat could cause problems. During the day, I find the temperature on the cores rising to ~ 140 degrees F whereas the average temperature was ~ 125 degrees F before replacement of the Hitachi. Naturally, I still recommend this drive, but beware of the heat.

I think the title says it all. Performed adequately during its short lifespan. But even with backups, its demise represents at least 20 hours of work getting the system to its pre-crash state. I've bought a ton of WD Drives, but this one was a complete loser.

02/08/2012 -- Follow-up
I used Western Digital automated RMA site to exchange drive for a new one at a shipping cost of $5.50. Although new drive could communicate with controller, it failed basic BIOS S.M.A.R.T. tests. To insure problem wasn't with system/controller, I tried same operations with another drive--worked fine. Tried new/bad drive in another system-failed in same way. Called WD customer service. I asked if there were QA issues with this drive. The agent told me there
was no problem with the drives, but since they used an outside shipper, they had no control over whether the drive was damaged during shipping. I could see where this might be a valid argument for third party transactions, but when WD controls the whole supply chain from factory to door, this makes no sense. If the product is not properly packed by shipper, time for WD to get a new shipper. Then the agent asked me for the serial number of the new drive. When I gave it to him, he said that the serial number did not match the drive they sent out. We went over and over the serial number, and he said it wasn't even close.
While he put me on hold, I went back through email from WD, and found the drive ship notice, which contained the serial number of the new drive--it was identical to the serial number I had been giving the agent! When the agent came back on the phone, he said that since the serial numbers didn't match, someone would call me tomorrow to resolve the issue. I told him about the email I had found. I said I wanted to speak to a supervisor. 20 minutes later, the supervisor came on, and said that the serial number reported by the agent was off one digit from the one I gave him. I said that I had repeatedly given him
the correct serial number. I told supervisor other things agent had told me re. damage during shipping. If it were possible I would change my 1 star to a 0 star rating.

Supervisor offered to upgrade me to Caviar Black 750GB for free, and provide free return shipping for DOA new drive. I agreed, but my confidence in WD products and customer service is shaken. I spent over an hour on the phone on this issue. Hopefully, I'll have better luck with the new drive. I'll write another follow-up when it arrives and I've tested it.

I ordered two of these drives: one to host my operating system (OS) and one as a back up drive. The one I was using for back up at first initialized and formatted correctly, but then the OS wouldn't recognize it anymore or allow the partition to be deleted and reformatted. I received a replacement for it from Amazon and it is working fine. Luckily I hadn't transferred any data to the drive while it was working because then I wouldn't have been able to wipe the drive prior to returning it.

I have no idea what was wrong with the one I returned, but I can only chalk it up to bad luck. In all my research before buying this drive, it seems like every manufacturer has problems, depending on what reviews you read, so I can't say it's an inherent problem with Western Digital.

The best part of the whole affair was Amazon's customer service. It was extremely easy to request a return, get a pre-paid shipping label, then ship it back. Amazon even shipped the replacement before I shipped the bad drive back, and at no extra charge.

Ordered by overnight to fix an iMac that seemed to be losing it's mind. Just installed Lion and since then it had been acting very strange. Googled changing a hard drive on the IMac and found all kinds of help on the web. Youtube has several very good videos on changing the hard drive on the Mac so since I have repaired many PC's I decided to give it a shot. Had to open it up a second time because I missed hooking up one of the connections, but it was good after that. Booted up on Snow Leopard and formatted the drive, installed the OS and then updated to Lion. Restored the programs I need from the time machine and now its working great. The hard drive is fast and the price is excellent compared to Newegg. I really pays to be a prime customer on Amazon. I did download and ran Onyx (free and a program you should have) and the hard drive looks good.Western Digital 500 GB Sata 6.0 Gb-s 16 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drives WD5000AAKX