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52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WD Caviar Black Sata II 1TB and other things, 8 May 2009
This review is from: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATAII 32MB Cache Dual Processor Internal Hard Drive OEM (Electronics)
A couple of weeks ago I had the sickening surprise of turning on one of my external drives, a 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1, only to find that it was no longer responding. Luckily for me the cause was the enclosure not supplying power to the drive, which still functions perfectly. However, it did lead me to read Samsung's warranty pages (more later) and give me a serious desire to make the backup I had been neglecting to do, and fast.
Thus I ordered one of these, a Western Digital Caviar Black. (My choice of Caviar Black over Green was simply a case of one being in stock, the other not, but the promise of slightly better response times seemed like a good deal too).
I went for Western Digital because the only other 1TB drives on Amazon at the time of ordering were from Seagate. You may or may not be aware that Seagate had been having some serious problems with the firmware of their Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB and 1.5TB drives in 2008. Under certain conditions the drive could go into a secure state which effectively turns it into a paperweight. These firmware problems are supposedly resolved (since January 2009) and "reliable" drives had been shipping for several weeks at the time I purchased this, but I didn't want to risk finding out that Amazon had been sitting on a stock of the affected models, which limited my choice to a Western Digital drive.
So, after previously buying (and still running) Samsung, Hitachi and Seagate drives, what can I tell you about Western Digital in comparison? Frankly, not a lot. Unless you use your hard drive very intensively or run benchmarks on it an average person wouldn't detect any difference between the different models. Only if you swap a 4200 for a 5400 or 7200rpm can you really detect a difference. All most people can talk about is reliability, and there isn't a lot to say there either, since hard drives (at least from the leading manufacturers) are statistically very reliable (Seagate's firmware problems aside). I can't really comment on the dual processor performance of this model either, as it is linked to my laptop externally via lowly USB 2.0, since I don't have an eSata port.
As another aside, many people moan in their hard drive reviews that the capacity never corresponds to that advertised; some put it down to the file system eating a chunk, which is only really a factor on very small drives. The real cause is that a gigabyte can be defined in two ways. Hard drive manufacturers quote their capacities using the decimal version of gigabyte, which is 1000x1000x1000 bytes. Operating systems quote file system capacity and file sizes in binary gigabytes, or 1024x1024x1024 bytes. So, if you're buying a 1TB drive and expecting Windows to display 1024GB of capacity, you're going to be disappointed, since you're actually only going to get 931GB (as Windows counts it).
As for packaging (of which many people have spoken in other reviews on Amazon) my drive arrived in its OEM (original equipment manufacturer) box, with a very healthy amount of foam, so no problems there. Another interesting fact I picked up while going over Samsung's warranty is that to return a defective drive under warranty you must return it in its original box, otherwise they will refuse it. I don't know if all manufacturers have similar conditions, or whether they will accept equivalent packaging, but I will be making the effort to keep hard drive packaging from now on.
So, in conclusion, for the moment I'm happy with the drive, the delivery and the packaging. I'll give it 5 stars for now and hope I don't need to come back and change it in the future.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
No problems, 26 Sep 2009
This review is from: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATAII 32MB Cache Dual Processor Internal Hard Drive OEM (Electronics)
Seems really fast on a new Windows 7 Ultimate installation (but don't all new installs seem fast?). On My PC gives a "Disk transfer rate" of 5.9.
It's quiet too.
I try to be "green" wherever possible, but this Black version must be greener than running 3 smaller drives.
Can't give 5 stars, as 4 weeks use doesn't give much indication of long term reliability, all I can say, is so far, I'm pleased with my purchase.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WD Caviar Black 500GB, 15 Aug 2009
Only took 2 days (to the far North of the Highlands of Scotland) from ordering to arrive from SHD Technology. Well packed. Used to replace an old hard drive that failed from another supplier. Took about 3 minutes to install on my G5 Apple Mac. Good solid drive, very quiet.
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