Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD6401AALS by Western Digital
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Our Price: $79.95 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD6401AALS
Digital camera Review: Fast, Quiet
Summary: 5 Stars
Purchased two of these for a RAID 0 Array and I am impressed by the speed(avg transfer around 200MB/s in RAID). Almost silent.Digital camera Review: Fastest Hard Drive I Ever Had!
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this hard drive at a good price. I needed something new to handle all my music production files. When I had read the reviews about this product, I was like I guess I should try if everybody giving good reviews about how fast it is. I had it for a month and I'm loving it so far. Thanks!Digital camera Review: First one was DOA, but second works fine
Summary: 3 Stars
First one arrived DOA, but Amazon sent me a replacement in just 2 business days. Put it into my computer and it worked just fine. Only gave it 3 stars because I had to send the first one back.Digital camera Review: Forget the Green, Get the black series
Summary: 4 Stars
I had recently purchased the 500GB green WD Caviar and was not impressed. first off the model number on the box did not match the model number on the drive (i read that this was due to WD including extra space...i.e. one person said they got a 640 with a note in box saying basically surprise you get a bonus) so i thought this was the reason for the discrepancy. it was not and then i went on to read that the drive is not actually variable speed (supposed to be 5400-7200rpm) and that it was fixed at 5400...my test reported 5000 and it was running 5 degree's C hotter than the 750gig drive i have as a backup.
the 640gig black version was much better, i went with the free "prime" trial and shipping was hard to believe just over 36 hours from order to in hand. the packaging was poor in my opinion, bubble wrapped the drive ok but the "air pillows" that took up the extra space in the box were busted or half inflated. there was enough room in the box for 2 more drives so it probably got bounced around pretty bad.
the drive itself is great..in and hour and 20 minutes i not only ran around the house doing house work but i manged to install windows 7 and most drivers. it still only scores a 5.9 on the windows performance rating, as did the green, but the green's "head parking" caused delays that made program not start then generate an error.
you would double click on a program and you could hear the drive click out of the park position after a second then half the time get an error that X failed to run because Y was delayed.
so far this drive is solid and well has 4 times the buffer than the green. would recommend over the green versions by far.
Digital camera Review: Good price, RAID 0 is neat!
Summary: 5 Stars
Got this to work with my other identical item. Doubled storage speed and increased read performance a bit (maybe 20% so far but I'm not sure if there's more I can do to tweak). On RAID 0: make sure you have the correct RAID drivers. I clearly identified "WIN 7" as my OS but Asus gave me plenty of non-Win 7 drivers to choose from so I went with the first/most recent which ended up being WRONG. Wasn't a big deal but it ate up a few hours as I tried to follow the procedure with the wrong drivers and with a 300Gig image to transfer... there goes a few hours. The Win 7 procedure is okay-ish but plenty of opportunities to botch it: Make recovery disk, make image backup of data (kept mine on an external HDD), tell your Bios you want RAID, configure your raid (ctrl+F1 i think... it tells you when you boot up), boot from recovery, option to restore from image, install drivers, pick the RAID drivers from your storage location (again had mine on a USB drive, thumb this time) in my case I had two drivers and a RAID console... installed all three no problem. With the first set of WRONG drivers I had it gave me like 50 drivers to chose from... it took forever to do whatever it was doing and gave no indication that it correctly installed so I went on to install the rest just to see what would happen and I would get an error message. when I got the correct drivers there was still no indication of "successful install" but I never got an error message and there was only three to choose from instead of 50 so I felt a lot better), Okay, where were we... yes, now just continue to load the image with all your files/settings and VOILA, DONE!! SIMPLE, right!?!? lol.. anyways it works, just a few steps to follow. I'm sure everyone's experience is a little different. I can't tell you how happy I was to walk back into my room and see that my computer had rebooted itself and all my desktop clutter/i-net favorites and everything else was right back where it should be but now on a 1.2 TB RAID array instead of 640GB... well, that's partially true... the drives were there but I had to go right click on "Computer" from start menue and then select "manage" and adjust settings in the disk managment section... Yeah... WOOHOO more crap to do! Well after clumsily Googling and a few head scratching moments and actions that didn't work... I think I ended up extending a drive or something and then VOILA went from 640GB to 1.2 TB. No data lost, no complete reinstall of Win 7. Just an awesome nerd experience for me to share. YES!!!