Customer Reviews

Western Digital Caviar Blue 640 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD6400AAKS

5 star:		(90)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I build computers as a hobby. Why pay for someone else to build one (one size fits does not fit all) when building your own is not too difficult and you can build with quality parts tailored to your own specific needs. Case in point, the WD 640GB HDD. Large hard drive prices are economical right now. Generally speaking, the larger the drive, the less the cost per gigabyte (GB). At Amazon's prices the WD 640GB drive was about $10 bucks more than the WD Caviar 16 320 GB drive with the same cache. Western Digital has recently color coded their drives: Black (high performance), Blue (mainstream) and Green (no brainer: ecologically friendly-for a hard drive). Where does marketing get these ideas? The Caviar 16 640GB falls into the Blue category. It is amazingly fast and quiet, thanks to its 16 MB cache and 3 Gb/s transfer rate. The technology is interesting in that WD utilized two 320GB platters which gives this drive an edge as compared to say 750 GB drives with similar cache size. The drive itself is nearly silent and the quietest HDD I have used. Its rated over 90MB/sec read and write speeds, which is very fast. Yes there are faster hard drives, but for the money this drive is an excellent choice.

My only complaint: the drive is warranted for 3 years not 5.

Amazon had the lowest price I found, and shipped the drive quickly. Turn around time from placing the order to delivery at my door step was four days. Stable, reliable and excellent price to performance ratio, this drive is a great choice for everyday computing needs.

The hard drive worked great I had to go online to get the product manuals and purchase the cables since it is a SATA II drive and my computer supports SATA I it took me several hours to make it work but once I figured out how to slow down the drive with the jumper which was not supplied it was a plug and play process. Make sure you know your system specifications before you order and get the needed cables and jumper & Screws all at once.

The drive is pretty fast and allows for allot of storage room. Amazon needs to learn how to pack a hard drive for shipment! The hard drive arrived in a box with a static bag around it and no protective padding at all!!! My drive is warrented until 2012 from WD and it is already making noise upon spin up. So it looks like I am going to have to ship it back to WD for replacement. I would not purchase this item from Amazon again not because of the drive; but because of the horrible packaging the drive was shipped in.

Update 2/19/09:
Tried to do another exchange from Amazon, and here is what I got:
" ....I'm sorry to hear that you experienced the same problem with your replacement shipment.

As it seems that the problem with this item is more widespread than we originally thought, we are not able to send another replacement..."

Original 2/18/09:
The drive is a big disappointment. The first one was defective. After cloning my old hard drive, it worked for a few hours. Then the Windows became very slow and unresponsive. Windows failed to reboot, it reported bad boot sector records.

Contacted Western Digital customer support. Downloaded and ran Data Lifeguard Diagnostic per instruction. The tool reported the drive had too many bad sectors, also the write zeros was failed. Returned it to Amazon for an exchange.

Just in case my older power supply unit was the culprit, it needed a Molex to SATA adapter to work with the drive, I ordered a brand new 430W Themaltake PSU. After receiving the replacement drive, I first ran Data Lifeguard Diagnostic on it. Sure enough, it again detected the unused drive has too many bad sectors. When tried clone my drive again, it failed half way. Only one of the two partitions was copied over. I used Acronis True Image Home 2009 15 days trial version for the disk clone. Now, my trial period is about up, and I still don't have a working drive. What a joke! Also, the price of the drive just dropped by $5 since I ordered it.

It seems these OEM drive have very poor quality control. What is going on???

Western Digital WD6400AAKS WD Caviar SE16 SATA Internal Hard Drive, 640 GB, 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM Large size (640 GB), fast and ultra quiet at a great price. Transferred my PC files to the new disk in about an hour, and then moved the old disk to an external USB case (under twenty dollars) for a portable backup. As mentioned, this is a bare bones disk (no SATA cable, instruction manual, transfer software) that is perfect as a replacement drive.

** Update 1 January 2009: Disk contiunes to work fine. Very quiet. Great purchase.

I bought the WD caviar blue HD after looking at speed tests on many different webpages. Although it is not as fast as its caviar black counterpart, the difference in speed is insignificant while the difference in price is not (check out www.barefeats.com for tests if you are interested, especially this page http://barefeats.com/hard112.html).

The HD arrived and was inside my Mac Pro within minutes. I am using it to back up my main drive and it has worked great. Transfer speeds were really fast, above 80 MB per sec on a sustained 150 GB transfer from one internal HD to the other. To be fair, my old HD was probably slowing it down though. I highly recommend this drive, and you can get it at a great price. I really have nothing bad to report about it. Just make sure you have your own SATA cable if you need it, because the drive doesn't come with it. If you have a Mac Pro you don't need that because when you put the drive into its slot inside the computer it connects when you slide it in (there is a connector right there which the drive plugs into when you slide it in).

I have a high quality/performance demand and I always research before purchasing. This drive is EASY to install (screw screw plug plug done) and works as advertised. I've had it for about a month now and for the format (Sata II), size and especially the price, you simply cannot go wrong with this purchase.

A definite "buyers choice"!

PS: Remember, this is OEM so you will need to obtain a power cord and data cable. I already had a few, they came with the motherboard, so no let downs for me. Be prepared... get yours in advance!

Installing, formatting and partitioning the WD6400AAKS in my late-2004 vintage PowerMac G5 was a breeze. I bought it to increase the storage capacity rather than the speed of one of my two internal drives. To ensure compatibility with the older computer, I installed a jumper to reduce the maximum transfer rate from 300MB/s to the first generation SATA maximum of 150MB/s. (This may have been unnecessary.) Even with this modification, benchmark tests show read/write speeds, both sustained and random, for the new WD drive ranging from 30% to 60% faster than with my second drive in the same computer, a Seagate 160GB SATA I model. I gave it 4 rather than 5 stars only because it is too soon to judge its durability. So far it exceeds my expectations, and the price was great. Amazon service also was great.

I had this drive installed in a desktop until a couple of weeks ago when I suddenly got a drive read error. Pulled the drive and it sounds like it's full of sand. Platter self-destructed spectacularly with no warning. It's under warranty, but I wonder what the next drive will do. At least I don't have to worry about security of info on the drive when I send it in. The drive was only about 8 months old. Very disappointed.

This hard drive is a great buy, also WD 1 TB drives get good reviews too from my friend.

It also runs 2 degrees C cooler than my seagate drive, which means it must be more energy efficient and reliable.