Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD3200JBRTL Caviar 320 GB PATA Hard Drive

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought this drive to replace my measly 30GB boot drive that came with my Dell. In order to replace your boot drive, you need to MOVE your OS to the new drive, and make it bootable. Simply dragging files won't do it at all.

After unsuccessfully using Norton Ghost 9 to try to clone my Win XP boot drive, I decided to use the FREE Lifeguard utility that came with the WD drive. Among other tools, it has the ability to image a drive to a WD disk.

It worked on the FIRST TRY!

Here are a couple of hints:
* During the following process, I always had the WD utility disk in my CD-ROM drive. The system would boot to this disk when all else failed. I also made sure the utilities were installed to my old Boot Drive (C:)
* Connect the new WD drive as your SLAVE (your old boot drive should still be a Master).
* Launch the Lifeguard tool, and go to the Set Up Drive option. Tell it you want to make the WD be a NEW BOOT disk (NOT just a drive for additional space), and have it copy over all of your old C: drive.
* Once it completes (can take hours), it says it needs to reboot to finish the job. That scared me to death, since the PC will start up with an old Boot drive as master, and a New Boot drive as a slave. I was terrified it would ruin my registry. I crossed myself a few times and did it. XP booted on my old drive, then the tool re-launched and completed the process.
* At this point, the tool simply says it is finished - and nothing else... I shut down the system, disconnected the old master, configured the new boot drive as a Master, and connected it to the IDE Master. Upon powerup, Win XP came right up! The new Boot Drive automatically came up as C:.
* NOTE: I had a slave drive originally. During the cloning process, I removed it from the system. Once the new drive was configured as a master, I put the slave back, and it came up like nothing happened. It retained the same drive letter as well.

Bottom line: For $150 (after rebate) for a 320GB drive with a very nice toolset, you can't go wrong. This also would make a nice TIVO upgrade drive for Series2 TIVOs.

By reputation Western Digital drives are very good BUT this retail packaged drive's warranty is for one year FROM DATE OF MANUFACTURE. There is nothing on the packing to indicate this and I only found out about it when I went to WD's website and entered my drive's serial number to buy an extended warranty. My brand new drive was manufactured 2/05 so I'm out of luck. You might want to look at other brands if the warranty is important to you.

The first drive I got was bad, and after an hour of fooling around I couldn't intall it. An expert friend then tried an hour of fooling around with BIOS, etc. but all the drive would do is keep clicking. I returned it to Amazon and the replacement worked flawlessly and fast

I could not beleive what a great price this was for a Western Digital drive. 320GB is a huge amount of space, and I use the drive to manage my increasing MP3 and photo library. My computer was bogged down and slow due to the increasing demands of the content these days. This WD drive solved my problem, and most importantly, the installation was hassle free and simple. What a great deal for a premium brand!

I would have rated this five stars, except that the included data life guard software failed to copy over my old XP boot hard drive successfully. The copy booted, but a lot of the installed software failed to work, or came up as unregistered. Luckily I was able to use a third party backup image utility to copy the old drive on to this drive. I would have been dead in the water if I did not have that utility. Otherwise, no complaints.

Hey what can I say, I only buy this brand of hard drive. I value my data, and every one i've ever bought is still in service today. you get what you pay for...it's the bomb.

While it is easy to say that 320 gigs is overkill, a few years ago I thought I would never fill my 120 gig drive. The installation was very simple, and the included software was able to copy the information from my old drive to my new drive almost without a hitch. For some reason it threw my firewall for a loop, and I also had to reactivate itunes, and had some problems with outlook. However, for the most part it was a smooth upgrade.

I haven't had any reliability problems yet, but since it is only a month old I would not expect any. I will say that the drive is quick, and doesn't suffer from the lag that some large drives suffer from.

Overall, I would recommend this drive as a great upgrade solution, with an easy upgrade path from your previous drive.

So far so good. Very easy to make this my primary hard drive. It easily cloned my existing hard drive. Very nice product.

I replaced my 40 gig C: drive using the software that came with the drive. I just pulled my back-up drive, installed the new drive as a slave, used the supplied software to make the new drive the boot drive (took about 90 minutes to copy everything), installed the new drive in the C: drive position, replaced my back-up drive, and was done. All very easy.

I am typing review on new Hard Drive. Needed Customer Support and received help I needed. Thnks