This is, in my opinion, THE product of choice when you need a reliable, affordable, and fast 2.5-inch drive. While the solid state drive is arguably the pinnacle of fast, this is the pinnacle of reasonably fast but much more affordable.
It’s high-speed makes it a good choice if a solid state drive is not a possibility for your main disk, and its reliability and durability makes it great for desktop computing even though it is marketed as a mobile drive. It may also be a good choice for upgradable gaming consoles when a SSD or hybrid drive isn’t an option. It runs circles around most other mobile HDDs, and at a price that is surprisingly affordable.
Whether you are using a Mac or a PC, this is the perfect drive to use as a high-speed clone (there are good programs for both OS’.) You use this WD Black in an external enclosure as a self-powered backup drive to make a clone of your hard disk. If you local disk fails, you literally drop this into the laptop and you can boot from it. It is equally great for a progressive point-in-time backup such as OS X’s Time Machine, or just as a self-powered external to give you extra data storage for your computer.
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A NOTE ON “FAKE” WD DRIVES AND AUTHENTICATING THE REAL DEAL
I am sorry to say that many Sellers are either intentionally or unintentionally misleading customers when it comes to hard drives. Western Digital is aware of this, and they have implemented an online tool called the “WD Warranty Checker” in which you can enter the serial number of your drive and confirm it is authentic with a valid warranty (you can with HGST as well, and Seagate has their own authentication system.) I do not recommend purchasing used hard drives from any third party Sellers because there is no way to know how that hard drive was used (and possibly used so much that the service life is almost over.)
Because the plain OEM cardboard boxes that Western Digital bare drives are packaged in are easy to replicate (as is the sticker on the outside that says the model and serial number), they are moving in the direction of shipping their OEM/Bare drives in a tamper-free type of packaging inside of the box. The hard drive is SEALED in a magnetic bag with a yellow Western Digital watermark on the bottom, and this bag cannot be opened without being physically torn or cut open. If you get a Western Digital product in a bag sealed only with a sticker or tape, I would be sure to use the WD Warranty Checker to verify it is just in an older packaging rather than a repackaging used by a Seller to make a hard drive appear brand new when it is not. I have attached a picture showing this. If the hard drive you get has had this packaging torn open previously and taped up, reject the shipment as that drive is NOT new.
Many used hard drives on Amazon are also sold as “refurbished” but in reality they are simply used drives marketed in a fashion to make it sound as if you aren’t taking a gamble on inheriting someone else’s old problems. Some Sellers seem to feel that making a few extra pennies at the price of their integrity is worth it, and it’s put a lot of good people into very stressful situations that they didn’t deserve. There are too many sellers engaging in this practice to even start listing names, but I strongly caution reviewing Seller credentials and buying a hard drive from a Seller with a solid return policy in the event you pay for a new drive and a 5 year old used drive shows up on your doorstep. This happens a lot more than you might expect…some of the Sellers who do this are even part of Amazon’s Fulfillment Program. Amazon needs to step up here and take action as this isn’t fair to you and it isn’t fair to me.
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HOW I LOOK AT HARD DRIVES
I’ve been in a position in which I have worked with a lot of drives over the years and have developed my own beliefs and mindset. This is to summarize how I look at Hard Disk Drives and my advice for storing data. The two biggest assumptions I operate under are:
1) ALL HARD DRIVES WILL FAIL. What differs is the run time the drive gives before it fails, and this is neither consistent nor predictable to a degree of good accuracy.
2) DATA RECOVERY IS RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE, OFTEN NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL, AND NEVER COVERED UNDER THE STANDARD WARRANTY OF A HARD DRIVE.
Because of that, I stress that one should NEVER STORE IMPORTANT DATA IN A SINGLE LOCATION THAT YOU WOULD NOT BE OK WITH LOSING FOREVER. While a home user may not need a RAID 5, setup using a Thunderbolt interface, they should always keep data in more than one location. That could be as simple as an external hard drive backing up data from Win 8 or OS X’s built-in backup systems so that the data is on the local disk of a computer as well as an external hard drive. Cloud services also have some backup advantages. Whatever method, just be sure to keep it in multiple locations. If one of those locations are damaged/lost, replace what was lost to ensure the data stays stored across more than one source. If the data is very important, store it in two different geographic locations (or inside a fireproof safe) in the event of fire or water damage.
I do not give brand loyalty to any single brand and the reason is because most major hard drive makers offer both some great and some terrible products. I occasionally have had hard drives fail on me that were some of the finest made. This happens and it is not avoidable. When you are putting coatings on the disk platter that are under 1 nanometer thick, there is an incredibly narrow acceptable margin of error. Such unpredictability means a consumer must take defensive action or else they are setting themselves up for an expensive, stressful, and costly incident of data loss.
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MAKING SURE YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL LAST IN THE LONG RUN
My advice with any new hard drive is to spend the time to stress test it, and not to rely on it fully until it has been used at least for a few weeks if not tested extensively.
Google’s study of hard drives showed us some very interesting observations. Most specifically, it showed how failure rates of new hard drives are really unpredictable. While after the 4-year mark shows a progressive trend of higher probability of failure, that isn’t the case when new. The first month of ownership can be one of uncertainty, but the trend suggests that a drive with a defect will generally fail in this time period. Failure rates in the short 0-1 month period are often higher than the period of years 1-3.
My solution to this has been to “stress test” ALL new drives heavily. I run a secure delete that takes multiple passes over the entire drive more than once. Then I will transfer an ungodly amount of data on and then off the drive, if possible, filling most of the drive. I will use a benchtest program that runs a multi-hour stress test. It makes the drive work hard, get hot, use the entire surface area, and work for a sustained period. Simultaneously, I also use an advanced disk management program that can take a very detailed look at the drive’s health. This simulates the real-world usage a drive will see if used intensely, which most of the drives I oversee are. My findings are that in many cases this is enough to get a drive with an issue to display symptoms of compromised reliability or have a catastrophic failure. Drives that have no issues generally go on to work reliably for years without a hiccup. It’s not perfect, but this has helped weed out many of the drives that would wind up failing shortly after they were put into service.
Why would someone want to spend the time pushing a drive specifically to see if it will fail? My logic is that I prefer it happen when doing a test rather than after I have set everything up and put important data on it. Especially given 1) the cost of data recovery is high, and 2) I prefer not to send a drive that may have partially recoverable confidential data that can’t be securely deleted. If one of my drives fails during the testing, I feel a lot better sending it back to a vendor with 10 copies of Shrek on it than I do business materials intended for internal usage or personal documents/files.
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THE HISTORY OF THE WD BLACK MOBILE DRIVES
Not too long ago, the older version of this product was called the WD Scorpio Black. WD’s 2.5-inch laptop drives had the Scorpio name, and their 3.5-inch desktop drives had the Caviar name. Their two common home-use grades were Blue and Black: Blue noted general-purpose usage, Black noted high-performance usage with often a longer warranty. Generally Blue was 5400 RPM and Black 7200 RPM (that has since changed as many Blue desktop lines are now 7200 RPM as well.)
The track records of these products are exceptional: always good speeds for their era, excellent GB-to-dollar value, great reliability, great durability, and very good warranty service. I am still using older Scorpio Black & Blue drives, and a few Caviar Black drives. Some of these are OLD for HDDs. They have long passed what is a reasonable expectation of service life. They have given consistent performance over many years, with extremely low failure rates. The quality that has characterized the lineage that this drive comes from shows how well this product is designed, and why this is a good choice today, and will still be a good choice years down the road when it is still working flawlessly.
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THE CURRENT WD BLACK MOBILE DRIVE
This current WD Black mobile drive is great. In a USB 3 enclosure, I am getting sustained read and write speeds of around 110 megabytes a second, which for a 2.5-inch hard drive is fantastic and an improvement over my older Scorpio Blacks (the upgraded processor certainly plays a role.) Like the older WD Scorpio Black, the energy consumption is reasonably low for a 7200-RPM hard drive and so if you use this in a laptop to replace a 5400-RPM drive, it should not have a majorly negative impact on battery life. It is also quieter than my Scorpio Blacks, and while some noise with a faster speed drive cannot be avoided, this is reasonably silent for a high-performance HDD. Like previous generations, the drive does a good job dissipating heat and inside of an aluminum external it rapidly dissipates the heat generated.
Like many other drives, this drive moves from SATA 2 (3.0 Gbps) to SATA 3 (6.0 Gbps), doubling the theoretical peak transfer of 3.0 Gbps to 6.0 Gbps. However, a single drive is not nearly fast enough to max out the older SATA 2, so if you are using this drive in a standalone fashion, the change from SATA 2 to SATA 3 really won’t affect you one way or another, and it’s more of a marketing aspect than a functional improvement for users of single drive systems. Like virtually all SATA 3 drives, it is backwards compatible with SATA 2 and SATA 1 enclosures and computers.
Also of note is the warranty on this drive: a 5-year warranty for a home-use drive is unusual. Generally, that kind of warranty comes with enterprise class drives. Western Digital’s willingness to offer a 5-year warranty on a home use product only further speaks to how confident they are of the long-term reliability of this drive (otherwise, offering an unusually long warranty for such an inexpensive hard drive would cost them a fortune.) The User Reviews here also demonstrate this.
You may also notice that Western Digital now has two versions of the 500, 320, and 250 GB versions of this drive. The slightly more expensive versions have a larger cache, slightly improved shock resistance, and are slightly thinner. They likely have slightly faster read and write speeds. I have not used these models, but the thinner profile and doubled cache may be beneficial to some users (neither are critical for my own applications.)
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GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THIS AS AN EXTERNAL: USB 2 AND FIREWIRE WON’T CUT IT
The speed of this drive is almost double the theoretical maximum speed that USB 2 supports. If you want to utilize the full read & write capability of this drive and you are using it as an external hard drive, you will need to use a high/super-speed port such as USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or eSATA (ideally the 3.0 Gbps revision, which is common.)
Using a slower port like USB 2 or FireWire 800/400 will result in the connection throttling back the drive speed to only run as fast at the max speed of the connection will allow. Therefore you will need an enclosure, a cable, and a computer that are all capable of using one of these faster interfaces. (USB 3.0 is generally the least expensive and most universal of the above-noted possibilities.)
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CONCLUSION
Overall, this is an extremely versatile hard disk drive. Even with the advantages of SSDs and their recent price decreases, HDDs like this WD Black will continue to have a role in computing. This drive is affordable, fast, and reliable. It’s a rock-solid storage solution that will give you years of usage for an affordable price; therefore, I highly recommend this product.
| Hard Drive | 500 GB Mechanical Hard Disk |
|---|---|
| National Stock Number | 7025-01-627-5793 |
