Western Digital 500 GB Sata 6.0 Gb-s 16 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drives WD5000AAKX
$ 65.99
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Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive – WD5000AAKX
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3 thoughts on “Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive – WD5000AAKX”
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Fast, quiet, solid,
My use for these drives is to replace a couple of aging five year old 80GB drives in Windows XP and XP Media Center machines. Those drives are still running fine, however, for the price, I had absolutely no reason not to upgrade them at this time.
I came across this drive middle of last week and Amazon was selling it new for $29 – I was scratching my head thinking “what’s the deal” and “what’s wrong with these drives”? Sure, even though they were above $25, Amazon was still charging for the shipping – so I took two to bring the per drive shipping down slightly. The old 3Gb version of this drive was selling for over $40 – so again, scratching my head about this. Maybe it was a pricing mistake? Whatever – it was a great price.
The drives arrived yesterday, same standard OEM packaging all of my six other WD drives have come in over the past 9 months. I used Clonezilla to clone the old drives on to the new, it went smoothly without any issues. I’m storing the old drives just in case these new ones have any issues I won’t have to rebuild the system drives from scratch.
I know that the motherboards in my machines cannot make use of the 6Gb throughput, however, these drives are definitely faster than what they’re replacing – older WD drives which indicate they are 7200RPM and 3Gb. Specs on the older drives indicate performance shouldn’t be all that different, but it is, and for the better. I won’t question it.
The drive indicates you can jumper pins 5 and 6 to limit it to 3Gb, but I didn’t understand the benefit of doing it, so I left it unjumpered and it’s working well.
To summarize – these drives are fast, quiet, and so far are performing excellently. I’m very happy with them thus far.
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|WD Blue 1T Drive – So far so good.,
I purchased the Western Digital 1 Tb Sata 6.0 Gb-s 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drive WD10EALX from Midwest Memory Outlet through Amazon. The drive was received within 3 or 4 days and was packaged extremely well. My original Seagate drive from my HP m9550F failed and was replace by the WD. The Seagate was the drive that HP kept shipping after a drive bios error was long known about. Information from the internet showed that lots of people lost valuable data because HP just kept shipping a drive with a known problem. Anyhow, I did get a bios update for the Seagate before it failed but it ended up failing anyhow.
The WD10EALX drive is fairly loud. I still have the drive located outside the case so that may contribute to the sound level. The noise seems to be from the head movement. The platter spin is silent. For the price this is one drive that is hard to beat and I am well pleased with it. My bios can’t take advantage of the 6 Gb/s transfer rate but the drive is plenty fast just the same. I have loaded around 600 gig of data onto it. After around 3 weeks I’ll assume it will not fail and put the case back together. If it fails I’ll update this review. I noticed on NewEgg that a few failures were being reported. Not the long-term ones but the more likely out of the box ones. Here’s keeping my fingers crossed. (Boot drive failures are a pain).
UPDATE:
OK. I put the case back together. The drive is not silent but it is pretty quiet. I can hear just faint clicks as it does its thing. Very nice. No problems with the drive at all. Recommended.
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|OK, but nothing special, unless you compare to Seagate, then it’s AWESOME,
It’s a bare hard drive that arrived quickly from Amazon and well-packaged. I replaced a 500GB WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS with this WD Caviar Blue WD10EALX as the primary drive in an HP i7 desktop. This drive and the old WD drive show basically identical CrystalMark results, but it does seem to load programs and boot faster (I restored an image of the old installation to the new disk, so everything else is the same). CrystalMark shows that it outperforms the Green series drives I own by 20-30{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3}.
I was looking at the WD Caviar Black drives, and saw some reviews that said they are loud, so I went for this one, which is advertised as quieter and cooler than the Black series and insignificantly slower than a Black. I don’t have a Black series to compare to, but the WD10EALX is definitely louder than the 500GB Blue version, and also louder than 1TB and 2TB WD Green drives that I own. It’s not LOUD, but it is louder than those other drives. It has the normal disk seek sound which is not annoying, but present in the same way the computer fan noise is present. If you are going for the ultimate in quiet, then this isn’t it.
If you want to compare this to Seagate, then it is a 300 star product. I used to be a Seagate customer as their price/performance ratio seemed great. I got hosed by Seagate with a 1.5TB drive, the same one that everyone else got hosed on. They offered to recover my data for $900. I told them to stuff it and I only buy WD and other brands now. My plan is to use this drive a year or so and replace with SSD, demoting this one to backup. I’d probably try another brand at this price point if I had to buy another 7200RPM 1TB drive, but I am not disappointed in my purchase, just underwhelmed by the performance. It is advertised as being quiet and fast, but it is not quieter nor faster than the disk it replaces, hence the relatively low rating and minor disappointment.
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