Customer Reviews

Western Digital 320 GB Scorpio Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive - WD3200BEKT

5 star:		(191)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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"Free-fall sensor - As an added layer of protection, if the drive (or the system it's in) is dropped while in use, WD's free-fall sensor detects that the drive is falling and, in less than 200 milliseconds, parks the head to help prevent damage and data loss."

Model: WD3200BJKT HAS this sensor and is a little more expensive. Worth it , In my opinion.

Model: WD3200BEKT does NOT have this sensor. Retailers are not very clear about this.

I installed this in my C2D 2.16Ghz MacBook Pro yesterday and couldn't be happier. The size has freed me from continual file cleaning and the speed increase is noticeable. There is a slight bit more noise from the drive, but is sounds like a white noise generator, a gentle hiss/hum, nothing to worry about and I am picky. There is no clacking or anything truly noticeable, definitely no heat issues.

As far as some of the comments people have posted regarding noise I would recommend anyone who has noise problems after the install check the rubber grommet mounts. If you don't get them back in place properly the mounts can't do their job and the noise will resonate thru the sounding box that is the MacBook Pro. As far as heat issues I would guess the user didn't check the cooling fans. I pulled my fans while I had it open and found each heatsink 1/3 covered in a cake of dust. I cleaned them and now the whole thing runs cooler.

NOTE: Do not get the WD3200BJKT for a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Apple includes a sudden motion sensor in the laptop and if you get the WD3200BJKT the sudden motion sensor in the drive will conflict with the unit in the laptop and neither will work.

I replaced the original hard drive on my first generation MacBook with this one. Worked like a charm. No problem whatsoever. Boot time significantly improved. Plus four times the space.

I purchased this one over the other one that was 320 gb and with a speed of 5400. this one is faster at 7200. it was so easy to replace my ps3 hard drive. i went from a 60 gb to a 320 gb. the only downside is that after i formatted it, it only showed 298 gigs available but i knew that would happen after reading the reviews for the other 320 gb drive that has the speed of 5400. bottom line works like a charm. i have played games offline and online for few weeks on it. i have seen several blue ray movies on it too. i cannot even hear it running. works great! I really havent notice that it runs faster than the stock PS3 seagate drive however it is much faster, so i am sure t must help a little. i also havent notice any diffferece as sound goes. the noise is just as quiet as the original if not more quiet. if you want to learn how to replace your hard drive on your ps3 go to youtube. there are so many videos on how to do it, it was a peace of cake.

Many people overlook upgrading their hard drive when looking for a performance boost. Because RAM is easier to install, and because there is a lot of common knowledge out there that RAM is the best thing to upgrade for speed increases, many notebook owners don't realize that if you have a 5400rpm drive, it is most likely your hard drive that is the biggest bottleneck in your computer.

This WD Black 7200rpm drive is the perfect solution for a relatively easy and hugely beneficial switch from a 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive. Another benefit is that the 16mb buffer size will give you an edge over most 5400rpm drives that only have an 8mb buffer.

Installation varies depending on your computer model. Make sure that you can access the hard drive bay before you purchase a replacement drive! Also make sure that if you plan to transfer files from your old drive to the new one that you know what means you'll be using to make the transfer. I recommend using Arconis True Image (which you can get a free 30 day trial of from their web page. Just Google it) which allows you to clone the entire drive so that you have a seamless 1-1 copy of the original drive that you can immediately boot from. To do the data transfer, you can use a hard drive enclosure, or if you have a networked PC, you can install the drive into your PC, do the clone, and then transfer the drive to the laptop.

There are larger drives coming onto the market in this form factor (500gb, 750gb) but unless you really need all of that space for media files, this is still a very nicely priced drive that comes in at about .40 per gigabyte.

This is a very reliable, high quality drive that will serve you well. Highly recommended.

This is a very good drive. It's fast and runs relatively cool. However it is extremely noisy. In my early 2009 macbook I can feel the vibration constantly. When placed on a desk I can feel the vibration on the other side of the desk. Not to mention constant whirring noise. It drove me insane. My old Dell XPS was loud but not as loud as this. Maybe i am just used to very quite operation of 160gb 5400 rpm drive that came with my macbook. Or perhaps the unibody construction of the macbook is amplifying the vibration as I don't see many reviews complaining of the noise. I've return the drive and got Hitachi Travelstar 320gb 7200rpm. It is a world of difference. just as fast, just as cool, and much much quieter. I highly recommend Hitachi over the WD.

If you have one of these mid-2009 Macbook Pros (15" or 13"), then you may need to downgrade your firmware from EFI 1.7 to EFI 1.6 in order to use this hard drive internally. You should go to an Apple Store and request that they do this, as there is a utility floating around the web that you might be tempted to use, but I'd be wary of it. I had to hunt for a store that understood how to perform the downgrade -- the Valley Fair store in Santa Clara, CA, had a Genius that knew how to do it. Now this downgrade does limit the SATA interface speed to so-called "SATA-I" which means 1.5Gbps transfer speeds. But this speed is more than enough for a 7200RPM drive, it's only a SSD that would be limited by the slower SATA speed.

As a further explanation, the EFI 1.7 firmware update was meant to enable "SATA-II", meaning 3Gbps transfer speeds, that are necessary for SSDs. However, it introduced this incompatibility that prevents these Macbook Pros from functioning with 3rd party "SATA-II" drives such as this one. Search the Apple community support forums for a topic titled "Firmware update and SATA II hard drive" for more information on this problem.

Let me reemphasize a point -- this EFI firmware downgrade is only necessary when using the hard drive internally through the SATA interface. When the drive is in an external USB enclosure it works fine with EFI 1.7.

As for the drive itself, it seems great so far.

(Some people might think this review is slightly off-topic, but I wish someone else had figured this out and posted this here before... I spent almost a week discovering this, even returning 1 disk to Amazon, thinking it was faulty.)

I installed this drive on a brand new laptop. Why pay the manufacturer a lot of money for an upgraded hard drive when I could do it myself for less than half the cost?

For those that want to follow a similar path, here's what you do, at least with Windows. First, make a set of recovery DVDs if your laptop didn't come with them already. Second, replace the hard drive in your laptop with this one. You'll have to remove a panel on the bottom of your laptop, pop out the old hard drive, remove the bracket from the old drive and attach it to the new one, then put the new drive into your laptop.

Once your laptop is closed up again, put recovery DVD #1 in the optical drive and turn on the computer. Your new drive will be formatted and Windows reinstalled, along with all the other junk that comes from the manufacturer.

Take your old hard drive and put it in an enclosure like this one: StarTech SAT2510U2 InfoSafe 2.5-Inch USB/SATA Hard Drive Enclosure. Note: that's not the enclosure I used - I bought a different one from newegg. If your laptop or computer has an esata port be sure to get an esata enclosure - data transfer rates are much higher than USB 2.0 or FireWire.

And there you have it, easy and quick...at least the drive swap is. Enjoy the improved performance you'll get with a 7200 RPM drive.

I bought the Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB Hard Drive to replace the Seagate Momentus 60GB one that was pre-installed in my PS3. The Hard Drive itself looks very stylish and feels heavy and solid in my hands, as any Hard Drive should feel. It performs differently than the Seagate in that deleting large volumes of data APPEAR to take slightly longer, but this is not the case. Although advertised as being able to run at 7200 RPM, it runs at 5400 RPM in the PS3 as this is the only speed the PS3 is programmed to run Hard Drives at (buy it will run at 7200 RPM if installed in a device capable of running hard drives at those speeds). I did notice a VERY slight increase in read/write access times, but by no significant stretch. I have been running this Hard Drive now for 3 or so months without any hiccups. Highly recommended.

I got this drive to replace the 120GB drive that came in my Macbook. The drive works great and liked how it was shipped, wish the box was little smaller though. But what more can I say. I have had it in my laptop for a few months now and no problems. I have formatted, added to, removed from and used the drive several times. This is highly recommended and yes it does with Macbook properly no problems.