Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD5000KSRTL/WD5000AAKS Caviar 500 GB SATA Hard Drive

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I purchased three of these for my Mac Pro Quad Core desk top which I purchased at Amazon. One 500Gb is set up as stand-alone/backup hard drive and Two 500Gb are set up as a RAID. They installed very quickly without any issues at all, are fast and work well with a Dual Processor Intel system, and are super quiet. I emphasize how quiet they are since I've had many Maxtor brand hard drives which while are quite reliable as well, but, seem to vibrate annoyingly at a frequency that resonates through the PC case. These WDs are in fact much quieter considering that TWO of the 500 GB SATAs plus another stand-alone 250 (comes with the Mac Pro for OS/boot drive) and a 3rd 500 Gb WD SATA drive of the same model (a total of four installed) are all installed and running so quietly. There's no noise or vibration to hint that 4 of these are inside the Mac Pro case. Read and Write performance on both the RAIDS and stand alones has been excellent. Highly recommended.

Not only is this drive much faster than my old IDE drive with 8M cache, it is as quiet as can be. In fact, if I didn't see my screen updating, I'd think the drive was dead it's so quiet! It's almost night and day the difference in noise!!!

WD replaced first with WD5000AAKS, second replacement, WD5000KS.. Be sure to register your drives with WD when you get them. One remaining drive (not replacement) making recurrent sound of winding down but no obvious performance problems. Ran WD boot CD diagnostics (short version) on each drive before 2nd drive went bad but nothing showed up. 22-JAN-08 number 3 died today. Still have noise. Mar-08 4th and last drive died. Replacement noiser than ever. Noticed these replacements are "recertified". No more Western Digital for me.

I buy this drive to replace my old IDE hard drives, this is a very fast and silent drive, and it includes the SATA cable with Secure Connect, this is a great product.

There are many reasons to get the internal Western Digital WD5000KSRTL Caviar 500GB SATA. The first is that for economy you get more GB for your money. Drives half the cost of this model provide much less than 50% of the storage space. Some might say that the 500GB is experimental and to go with a solid 200MB drive, but the 500GB stability has shown failure rates no more or less than those models. To top it off WD have really taken the drive market by storm. I once owned an array of Seagates (and still do and am happy with my 200GB drives). The Seagate Barracuda has always been a dependable favourite, but Western Digital Caviar SATA should be given a test drive.

The whole point is that hardware compatibility standards have actually made that overnight leap. Many users will be looking to the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor about this time. In turn this means seeking out a motherboard like the Intel DP35DP or one designed for Core 2 Quad chips. When you engage these mobos you will be hit with new standards. These mobos force you to drop PS/2 connections (unless you get adapters) and the 3.5" Floppy is officially extinct with them. While they can handle IDE they are really built SATA drives. Cue the Western Digital WD5000KSRTL Caviar 500GB SATA. It is a monster drive, 0.5TB in one. With two of these you automatically have 1TB. That is phenomenal. While 1TB WD SATA drives exist, the stable ones are the 5400 Rpm and the 7200 Rpm version is cutting edge and so at your own risk. I would get this 500GB model and make your next buy the 7200 Rpm version of the 1TB drive, but do wait so that WD deliver on the same stability as this 500GB model. Eventually you will have a system with 1.5TB.

So essentially what we are looking at here is not just getting a new hard drive but probably a new PC. For those who already run SATA then they get a massive storage device to add to their system. For those who are wondering what to do with a new PC the key is to eliminate IDE and go with a SATA system. This also means getting a SATA DVD-RW while you are at it. It will be SATA all the way.

Those who want to combine IDE drives and SATA are in for headaches unless they have experience. Another possible nightmare is that XP installations won't recognize SATA drives without a driver that is usually installed via 3.5" floppy... and yeah, these aren't supported by some Intel Core 2 Quad mobos. Vista handles it no problem so you can see where this is all going. These are the kind of forces at play. So when you look at a drive like this you need to see a much bigger picture that is the Vista, SATA, Core 2 Quad direction. Either that or you need some experience with SATA/IDE hybrid setups.

Pros:

Western Digital

Stable

Fast

0.5 TB in one drive

Perfect for Vista

Cons:

Windows XP SATA support on some Core 2 Quad mobos is a nightmare

1TB 7200 is here already

I bought this hard-drive to replace an older 160GB that was failing. This 500GB Western Digital works Perfect with Windows Vista Ultimate, I say this because I am using it right now. I can Multi-Task with No Problems at all! I listen to my Big iTunes - what I call my jute box music player, I have two Browsers running and a online game running, and this hard-drive keeps up with everything Great! Plus this is the Quietest hard-drive I ever owned!

My System is a Dual Core Pentium D 2.8Ghz and I have 2GB RAM. I use a Diamond Viper X1950 PRO ATI Radeon 512MB video card.

I purchased this harddrive in order to have more space for my music and pictures. it is very quiet and also very fast. I use it as my new C drive now and I did not expect just a fast harddrive to accelarate my system this much. Booting and picture browsing so much faster now - even though I copied the files from my old C drive 1:1. It also comes with a SATA cable. I can highly recommend this product.

I purchased this hard drive for a MAC PRO to use as a spare or back up drive. After using it this way I came realized the the drive seemed to function faster and quieter than the OEM toshiba drive in the MAC pro which was also a 500GB SATA 300 drive. I made this drive the primary drive and relegated the OEM drive as the secondary. I am so pleased with the speed at which this functions and its silence. I have also used Seagate Baracuda drives of similar specs and find this drive to be the winner among the three I have tried.

This drive is a little more expensive than the Seagate but I think worth the price if you are looking for a break from the usual distraction of hard drive noise.

This drive is very quiet, and very fast. I am using it in SATA 150 mode since my motherboard doesn't support 300 speed. So I can't comment on how much faster it would be.

Western Digital WD5000KSRTL Caviar 500 GB SATA Hard Drive Only one word describes this drive. Excellent. Just plug in and drive is ready. I am using two of these drives in D-Link DNS-323 in RAID 1 configuration.