Customer Reviews
Great performance drive
I bought this 1.5 years ago and so far have had no issues with it. Performance is pretty good, though it is a tiny bit noisy. Read more
by PC Guy
My first bad experience with Wester Digital hard drives...
Ever since the fiasco I had several years ago with some IBM drives (which concluded with IBM losing a class-action lawsuit and me getting a few $50.00 checks! Read more
by Seth
A Drive with history of problems!
I bought one of these new in early 2009. A few weeks ago, just before Memorial Day, the drive died. Read more
by Thomas L. Struckman
Drive failed, awfull warranty service.
Let me start by saying that I bought this drive about a month a go. The moment I connected it and booted the OS I got error messages that the drive is failing. Read more
by Denis
Satisfied
Owned for two years with no failure yet, running smooth and was easy to setup.
Came in great packaging.
by ff
died within 10 months, awful warranty service
This is probably the worst experience I have had with a PC component supplier in my 20 years building computers. Read more
by joejoe
Dependable drive at a good price
I put this drive into service about six months before posting this review. Before using the drive, I ran it through my own standard torture suite which includes a multipass... Read more
by Personne
Not as unimpressed as initially
I have been looking for a pair of drives (primary/clone) for an aging server for preventive maintenance purposes. Read more
by rsinj
Good, fast drive. Faster than green
This is a good fast drive. It's louder and faster than the green. I bought it after I have 2 greens corrupt.
by Michael D
A work horse
Great drive for continuous operation, quiet and well built drive. The black series of WD drives are the most durable well built for continuous reads/writes such as servers.
by Creative Shopper
This review is from: Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS (Electronics)
This is for people (like me) who've never done this before... I use Windows Vista and an HP desktop computer.
1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn't come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn't seem noisy.
2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won't support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don't get this drive.
3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable - 4pin/2x15pin SATA - 12in. This is a "Y" adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn't have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.
4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of "rail" for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.
5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.
6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say "locating... installing" or something like that.
7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) - Manage - then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the "drive 1" (or whatever) designation to make it "online". Then right click the long color band over the drive's partition graphic and start the "new simple volume" wizard. Stayed with the defaults.
That's about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I've error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it's doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.
I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don't know if this is the same on other PC's) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn't. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)
This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!
