Customer Reviews

Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD2500BEVE Hard Drive - 250GB - 5400rpm - Internal

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The WD2500BEVE hard drives are very unreliable. I'm on my third one. My first lasted 6 months. The next lasted two months. This one less than a month. There is a five year warranty from Western Digital, so I keep sending them back. Unfortunately this doesn't help me when I need my laptop. I cannot rely on it to load windows anymore. This isn't caused by my computer. I purchased this on Newegg last fall, and if you read the reviews on their website, this is a very common problem.

I do not recommend this at all.

the hard drive is very OK, it increase my notebook batery life and is very quiet

I bought this drive because I wanted a LARGE PATA drive to upgrade my Compaq nc6220. Preferred retail packaging, because I thought any necessary screws, jumpers, software would be included. This is not the case here, so I subtracted one star for this. However, the retail packed drive was STILL CHEAPER than the OEM packaged drive. Inside the fancy retail box is a note that says basically "If you don't know what you're doing, get help and good luck." I found the software on WD's website easily enough. The downloaded software performed Windows registry changes that were necessary to recognize the drive's full capacity. Once that was done, I used Windows to format the drive. I now have 232Gb of disk space-- wow! The drive jumper information was more difficult to find on the WD website, and it was necessary because the 250 was installed first as a SECONDARY or SLAVE device, which required a jumper on the drive. If you find yourself in this situation, simply search the WD Knowledgebase for "jumper settings" and you will find the necessary info.

Despite the 4 star rating and the observations above, this is a fine hard disk to update older notebooks that have PATA disk interfaces. If you don't care about the stuff I mentioned, call it 5 stars for you!

This is a review of a hard drive I have had for several years. I waited to write a review until I could see how this drive worked in the long run. It has now been running continuously for over 2 years and has not failed. In the mean time I've had 4 - 1TB drives (Maxtor and Seagate) that have failed within a few months of use and had to be exchanged (which both companies honored their warranties). It may not be gigantic like the newer drives, but it is reliable.

This version is intended for the "techies" that know what they are doing, thus the "OEM" tag. The drive is completely clean w/o instructions. I bought it because PATA drives are rather limited in choices now and I needed to upgrade my older laptop from an 80GB to this 250GB. Also the price was good. If you need some "tools for dummies," I can recommend a freeware that will do everything you need, including cloning and a feature to change the partition size after cloning (from, say, 80GB to 250GB). The freeware is EASEUS Partition Master - Home Edition. Surprisingly, the cloning process only took 1.5-3 hrs for 76GB on USB 2.0. One other thing, my old, single connector USB drive enclosure did not provide enough power from my laptop. So, I had to purchase a newer one with the double (or "Y") connectors on the laptop end of the enclosure's cable. This was a learning experience. But, all the problems were "operator induced." It has only been one or two weeks, but the drive appears to be relatively fast AND quiet. I'm liking it!

I had a 4200rpm pata and it was almsot dead..after this WD 250GB drive it gave a new life to my sony vaio.

i dont know why manufacturers get out a 7200rpm drive...anwyays its silent and increased my laptop performance

I was looking for a spacious hard drive to replace my dying notebook HDD (with all clinks and clanks coming out every now and then). Although the SATA drives are available for cheaper GB/$, this was the best price I could find anywhere else for a 250GB PATA. Surprisingly the OEM versions of this HDD were more expensive than this consumer packaging. Shipping was incredibly fast even with the package arriving a week ahead of estimated delivery data.
The drive is amazingly silent although I can feel its vibrations through my laptop frame. This didn't happen with my old drive (Hitachi). It would only be noisy but no vibrations. Installation was a breeze and I since this was faster than my old drive (5400 vs 4200 rpm), the reimaging and installation of all the s/w that I use was a breeze. I wish larger capacity HDDs were available at a competitive price (if you take the available SATA HDDs in the market, 1TB and more..)
Overall a very attractive drive if you wish to add some extended life to your old laptop. Buy as large a capacity as you think reasonable, keeping in mind that in case if your notebook dies sooner than you expected, you can still use this drive with an external casing. I have planned to have this connected to my TV (USB HDD capable) whenever the time comes.

After about an hour of searching for a new laptop hard drive for my 4 year old laptop, I found this to be the largest hard drive available with a Parallel ATA connector (which is what all older laptops use to interface with their hard drive). After install, I found out that my laptop would only recognize 120 GB of the total 250 GB. Apparently, older laptop motherboards only recognized 120 GB without a bios update, and unfortunately my laptop manufacturer never released a new update for my laptop. Now I'm stuck with a 250 GB drive in a system that only sees 120 GB of it... Moral? Make sure your bios support this size before you buy.

Thank goodness it was cheap!

Fast drive, I replaced a 60GB dirve out of my laptop with this drive and I definietly noticed a speed increase. However, my laptop's BIOS didn't support 48bit LBA and could only recognize 137GB of the 250GB. There is software that you can download from Western Digital to read the rest of the drive in WindowsXP/Vista. I didn't use it because I have a service partition that is in Linux that isn't compatible with the software.

Really bummed me out losing the storage space, however the price of the drive was only $10-$20 more expensive than a 160GB drive. Reccomend you check to see if your BIOS supports 48bit LBA before purchasing.

I installed this hard drive in a Fit-PC Slim, a tiny, fanless computer that has a PATA interface. I use the hard drive for network attached storage, and I have had no problems with its speed, performance, heat level, or noise level. It is considerably quieter than my 3.5" external hard drives. I recommend this if you need the upgrade. I am quite happy with it.

I think the PATA interface is on the way out, however, so unless your hardware requires it (like mine did), I would go with a SATA drive.