Western Digital WD15EADS Caviar Green 1.5TB SATAII 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Green Power OEM Internal Hard Drive

This 1.5Tb Caviar Green drive comes with the same eco friendly [green] features as the rest of the range. Here the three platters spin at an undisclosed speed, set somewhere between 5,400 and 7,200rpm - every drive is set to a unique optimised speed based on tests of its mechanics during manufacture. Other green features work to lower power requirements. The result is an excellent power draw of around 5W [compared to nearer 8W for a standard drive]. Performance is decent too, with a file read test of 85Mb/sec, and a write speed figure of 79MB/sec - perfectly decent for a drive with green ambitions [in fact reasonable for a non-eco gaming 'black' type hard drive]. For some reason the larger drives seem to typically run a tad faster than the WD green 1Tb drive as well. However do check out the 1Tb and 2Tb WD green hard drives as they may offer better value per Gb than this drive on the day [prices fluctuate] - although the larger 2Tb drive often attracts a premium being the largest consumer drive on the market [at the moment]. These OEM drives are supplied without fitting screws or cables, so you also need a StarTech 18 inch Serial ATA Data Cable and probably an LP4 Adapter for the PSU, plus some PC case screws [unless your PC case is a screwless design]. My drives were delivered well packed by Amazon, each in a foam lined box within one outer box. For older PCs these drives will be OK for a main system drive, but they are slightly sluggish so for a modern fast PC you could reserve them for use as large secondary storage drives and get a nippier 7,200 rpm Western Digital 'Black' drive for the main C: Windows system drive [these 7,200 rpm drives are noisier though].

I use three of these 1.5Tb and one of the 2Tb WD green drives and despite being a regular gamer these drives are fast enough for my purposes. More importantly Western Digital drives seem far more reliable than my budget Samsung 500Gb drives supplied with my Mesh PCs, two [of four] of which have failed in the last few months [repeated loud click of death - they limped on to recover files but the Windows install got shot prior to recovering/checkdisking the drive]. Speed tests demonstrated that these WD green drives also run significantly faster than the Samsungs in my PCs, no doubt helped by them having twice the cache size: 32Mb. Plus the WD green HDs offer great storage space for backups, media storage and games, run quieter, cooler albeit slower, with less draw on the PCs PSU [all likely to aid reliability]. Note though, apparently these drives are unsuitable for some RAID configurations as the 'green' mechanics can get reported as a drive failing, and WD say the hardware problems of earlier versions of these green drives have since been corrected. If you are running Windows XP don't go above the 2Tb on one hard drive limit and be wary of Western Digitals newer drives with 'Advanced Format Technology' thats not so XP compatible [these need XP jumpers installing on pins 7/8 prior to install].

Those gamers desperate for the last ounce of hard drive speed might want to look elsewhere - probably [at the moment] to the 1.5Tb Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 with a read time of 99MB/sec and write speed of 85MB/sec or to one of the Western Digital's 1Tb/2Tb 'black' range [neither of which have such 'green' credentials and the price for the WD 2Tb black is steep at the moment]. Note though that around 8% of all new hard drives fail in the first year after manufacture, so don't trust all your crucial data to one new hard drive - or to one PC [lightning strikes can wipe out all the internal/external hard drives in one go or if the PCs stolen all the hard drives are likely to go with it]. Compared to the WD Black gaming hard drives five year guarentee, these WD Green drives only have the standard WD three year warranty [during this period hard drive exchange after failure is easily arranged via Western Digitals website].

I bought this as a back-ups drive for my PC, it having a total of 3 drives (System, Data & back-up). I use it to back-up the system and data drives of 3 computers. Performance is not an issue and the benefits of a lower power consumption draw (in terms of heat as well as power cost) far outweigh any drop in absolute speed, not that it's noticeable anyway.

A breeze to install.

Excellent.

I bought this drive to put in my Home Server. It has been a dream! Fast and cool in use.
Pretty much everything you would want from a large drive.
I would recommend it to anyone needing to increase storage by a significant amount.
Go for it!