Customer Reviews

Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Green Internal Hard Drive SATA II 16MB - Retail Package

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This drive is definetly quite. You can not even hear it. If you have a dell and you install the drive be sure to turn on the sata link on the mother board by pushing F2 and following the instruction to turn on the sata link. If not your computer will not recongnize it. Like mine did. But this drive is simply awsome. For I have tons of music, pictures and games and now I can feel at ease that this drive was for me. This drive also comes with software to partition and drive to drive copy. It did take over an hour and half for the drive to format itself. I would recommend this drive to anyone and sense its more energy efficiant than the other sata 500gb drive gives this drive a two thumbs up. This drive also has the same specs as the other western digital 500gb drive.

The transfer rate is half the rate of the non-green version.

This model is rated: Transfer Rate = 145MB/sec

I bought this HD with the intent of having it as a secondary, large capacity storage drive. My somewhat old computer had finally reached its storage peak, using up all the space in a 80 Gig hard drive (yea it's old).

I wanted to search for a hefty improvement over my older drive, capacity wise, and a 500 Gig HD would be ideal for me. Mostly, the hard drive would store my growing addiction to music from my Zune Pass, as well as store massive Photoshop files.

While I could have used a faster, more responsive drive, I chose this one because of its large capacity for the low, low price of $70. I also wanted something that would run cooler than a full-powered, high-RPM HD, and still keep the electricity consumption down.

Yes, it does retrieve information at a slower pace than a 7200 RPM drive, but the difference isn't as noticeable than what I already have. Second, this is an excellent drive as a secondary storage device to an aging computer. Would I recommend this as a master HD on a new computer? No way, too slow--unless high performance isn't what you're looking for.

However, if you just want to bump up the storage of an older computer, this will do and do you plenty. Installation is quick and easy and the formatting is simple to do. Overall installation took less than 30 minutes. Once installed all you have to do is insert the included disk and follow the instructions that you wish to set the HD to.

This HD isn't the top of its class, but what you lose in performance you gain in savings and lower power consumption. IF you're not building a monster rig and instead you're building, replacing or adding a hard drive to an older or simple rig, this is a great little hard drive to own.

Bought the drive to replace an old failing Seagate. Quickly transferred the data before the Seagate died. I was transferring files when this one quit spinning and is now dead. Now I get to pay for intrusive data recovery because I was not able to do any backup between install and failure (a few hours). This "inexpensive" drive will end up costing hundreds in data recovery. Oh well.

I bought this as part of a system upgrade of my eMachine PC, which includes a complete upgrade; from motherboard to power supply. Anyways, I have not yet installed this harddrive, but read some excellent reviews. The reason I'm giving it a 4 at this time is because once I opened the package and removed the hd I found out the Western Digital had included a 640GB with 32 cache in its place. There was also a note indicating the "140 extra gigabytes of disk space at no extra cost!" I don't know how many boxes are out there with the extra capacity hds and the increased cache, but, so far, I am satisfied with the purchase.

Con: I almost didn't buy this drive because it doesn't include the SATA or power cable as opposed to the Seagate that comes with both. I went with it because I already had the cables I needed and it was $5.00 less than the Seagate with the same "box" specs, but it's something you might have to consider before purchasing it.

It's generally assumed that this hard drive trades access speed for energy efficiency. If so, I've found that it's not noticeably slower than any other hard drive, as used in my home desktop PC.

Two minor complaints about the hard drive -- too minor to detract from the rating:

1) The included mounting screws were quite short. Perhaps the case I'm using is non-standard, in that there's some empty space to allow for thick rubber gaskets between the drive and the case frame, but I had a difficult time mounting the drive, and I'll have to get longer screws to mount it more securely.

2) The box says that the drive is compatible with Windows and Mac OS X. It doesn't mention that it's compatible with Linux. Of course, it would be compatible with any modern operating system. Perhaps the compatibility refers only to the installation software, which isn't really necessary anyway, since any modern operating system will have the utilities to handle setting up a hard drive.

I bought the same model drive for an Atom-based fax machine/ home storage server. I originally was trying to use really old drives and found their spin up speeds are loud beyond belief, and honestly for a drive that will be on for long periods of time, I'd rather have a quiet drive. I do recommend this drive if you're using it for something that does not require excessive hard drive usage.

I bought this drive as a data drive for video work in my Dell Vostro running Vista. I mounted it, plugged it in and couldn't see it in My Computer. I am new to Vista, so I had to search around to find out how to set the drive up. After a little while I clicked the right buttons and got the drive up and running. I am quite satisfied with the drive.

Drive is quiet and quick. Currently using it for my pvr. Would purchase again.

This is a large drive for the price. However, the performance of this drive is not up to par. I figured the whole "Green Power" tagline was mostly just marketing and that perhaps it had a more efficient motor. Turns out it actually achieves it's power savings through poor performance. Pretty much every consumer grade drive out there today spins at 7200 RPMs. Not this drive. Nobody actually knows how fast it spins since WD doesn't publish it. One thing we do know is that it spins at less than 7200 RPMs. I think the main problem is that WD is not up front about all this. I've had good success with WD drives, but this is not a winner for me.