Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Green SATA 3 Gb/s Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AADS

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002P3KO4C
• Item model number: WD5000AADS
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 29, 2009

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

WD Caviar Green Hard Drives – Cool, quiet, eco-friendly.

The WD Caviar Green desktop SATA hard drives give you all the capacity you need for your photos, music and files. These drives make it possible to build cool and quiet systems, while delivering the right balance of system performance and energy conservation.

Why you should choose WD Caviar Green:

WD Caviar Green hard drives provide high capacity storage while using up to 40% less power than traditional 7200 RPM drives. In addition, these hard drives are quieter and cooler than traditional 7200 RPM drives.

Cool and quiet.
WD GreenPower Technology yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics perfect for ultra-quiet PCs and external drives.

Reduced power consumption.
WD's IntelliPower technology delivers both significant power savings and solid performance. Additionally, WD Caviar Green drives consume less current during startup allowing lower peak loads on systems as they are booted.

Features at a glance 500 GB of desktop storage Reduced power consumption SATA 3 Gb/s interface WD GreenPower Technology 2-year limited warranty

Ideal for:

• Adding lots of storage in desktop PCs or external drives and NAS devices
• Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music
• Environmentally-conscious individuals seeking reduced power consumption

Features:

SATA 3 Gb/s interface - The industry standard and most common interface.

NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

Desktop / Consumer RAID environments - WD Caviar Green Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications. (RAID-0 / RAID-1)*

*Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Green Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD's Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

Leading the way to green hard drives - WD led the industry in creating a new category of eco-friendly hard drives that use less power and help reduce the world's energy demands one computer user at a time. These drives consume significantly less power than standard drives spinning at 7200 RPM. All WD Caviar Green drives are lead and halogen free, resulting in less pollutants getting into our environment. Beyond the product level, WD's green initiative goes even further focusing on recycling and improving the cleanliness of the air, water and land in the locations surrounding WD facilities.

Upgrading your drive is easy - WD Acronis TrueImage, available as a free download on the WD Support site, enables you to copy all your data to a new drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to get all the benefits of a new drive. Note: Bare drive does not include any cables or mounting hardware.

The WD advantage - WD puts our products through extensive Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) prior to any product launch. On average, each new product goes through 600,000 hours of testing. WD also has a detailed Knowledge Base with more than 1,000 helpful articles. You can also call toll-free support 7 days per week in the U.S. and Canada. See the WD Support site for full details.

WD-certified packaging - All WD drives purchased from Amazon.com are shipped in WD-certified hard drive packaging. It is designed and fully tested to provide WD products with the highest of safety while in transit. With WD-certified packaging, you can rest assured that your WD hard drive will arrive safely, fully protected, in an environmentally-friendly, non-descript, easy-open package.

Compatibility
Works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, Mac and Linux operating systems.

You might also consider:

3.5-inch Internal Comparison Chart WD Caviar Blue WD Caviar Green WD Caviar Black WD VelociRaptor Value and reliability for every day computing. Cool, quiet, eco-friendly. Maximum performance for power computing. The fastest SATA hard drive on the planet.   Ideal for Family and business computing. Desktop PCs, external drives and NAS devices. Photo and video editing, and maxed out gaming systems. Performance enthusiast systems and workstations.   Capacity range 80 GB – 1 TB 320 GB – 3 TB 500 GB – 2 TB 150 GB – 600 GB   Interface SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s PATA 100 MB/s SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s   Form Factor 3.5-inch 3.5-inch 3.5-inch 3.5-inch   Cache 8 MB – 32 MB 16 MB – 64 MB 32 MB – 64 MB 32 MB   Limited Warranty 2-year 2-year 5-year 5-year   Highest capacity         Highest performance         Photo Video editing

Product Description

Western Digital 500 GB SATA OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD5000AADS (Caviar Green)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Hard Drive For The Money, November 11, 2009

By 

A. Taft "Technophile" (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

I recently built a new Windows 7 Core i7 system with some new parts and some old ones from my prior system. Since my last computer had hard drives with a couples years under their belt, I opted for two new 500GB 7200RPM Western Digital SATA Green drives. The investment in my data's security was well worth the outlay. I couldn't be happier. They are silent in my CPU's case (seriously, I can't even feel them if I rest my toes against the case during read/write operations) and speedier than any hard drive I've owned before. The plan is to keep these until the price point of solid state disk drives falls to around traditional hard drive prices. I figure that time will be around when the world ends in 2012... if you believe in that nonsense. ;p

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Got 2 of them...working great!, March 19, 2010

By 

eyecore (PacNW, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Green SATA 3 Gb/s Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AADS (Personal Computers)

Purchased two of these to use as a mirrored external backup drive. Performance, while nice, isn't critical to me (since it's all going through a USB2 interface anyway), but the noise level and power consumption is. After my Seagate drive died (they're not even worthy of a link to their product. Point is: don't buy SeaGate as their firmware likely is still riddled with bugs that they'll release an update for...after you've lost all your data.)

At any rate, after formatting these drives and doing a series of tests for integrity, these seem to be up to the standard of all the other Western Digital drives I've purchased in the past. They run on low power, cool, and very quiet - the fan in the external enclosure is far louder than both these drives combined. Copying data to and from the drive was flawless, and, while not as fast as many other drives on the market, if you're looking to save power and/or it's going into an external enclosure anyway (and speed doesn't matter much), then these really drives can't be beat.

Would highly recommend. The only "problem" with Western Digital drives are they last TOO long. As I write this, I have 4 WD drives next to my desk: 3gig (from August 1997), 8gig (March 1999), 13gig (March 2000), and 80gig (June 2004). Yes, WD stamps the date on their drives...and they all work as flawlessly as the day they were purchased. It's just difficult to justify using 5volts to gain so little space.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drive tests and works great so far., February 16, 2010

By 

Hi-Tech Geek (Pgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Green SATA 3 Gb/s Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AADS (Personal Computers)

I just installed this last night as a backup drive.

I bought it to replace my 2006 WD primary drive, but the packaging was so bad, I thought I better test it first.

I have all Western Digital drives and was able to download a program from them that makes adding or changing drives a snap.(Acronis)

The second program(Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows) does a nice job of checking connected drives for errors and performance. And it monitors for pending failures.

I was a little shocked to see no molex power connector on this drive. Luckily my 2006 PC has a power supply with sata power plugs available. I also had to flip flop the data cables because my old secondary drive used a WD connector (Connect 1) that covered the sata power port on this drive. WD sells a Connect 2 cable for $10 that does not cover the power port. Also, Amazon offers sata data cables and molex to sata power adapters. The retail version might include some cable options, and would be worth checking because I could have gotten a retail version for just a few $$$ more.

It would be wise to open your PC cover and find out what power and data options you have before ordering.

Day 2: Running the extended Lifeguard tests and forcing Norton Ghost to it daily. No problems yet. I see it is back on Amazon. I hope they fired everyone that picked the shipping methods previously.

Day 25: Getting near the 30 day Amazon return policy. Have hammered the drive as much as possible installed opposed to how bad Amazon HAMMERED the drive during shipping. I plan to make this the new primary tomorrow.

I really think FREE SHIPPING should be looked at by Amazon. My box should have been inside another buffered container. I used to ship mega $$ fiber optic boards across the USA and would not ship a fragile HDD like they did. Check the WD site for HDD handling.

Day 2 of the conversion to primary drive: The drive is quiet. All I hear now is the fan. Startup and shutdown seems faster than the '06 WD80. I'll bet going to a 32 MB Cache helps.

It's been over a year and this has been a great purchase!!