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: Very good performance
Summary: 5 Stars
these HDD from WD are very efficient and fast. I have purchased 2 of them and my score in vista went from 5.7 to 5.9 ..... wow
They are fast and quiet when under intense read/write loads.
Definitely, a recommended buy.
Digital camera Review: Very noisey
Summary: 2 Stars
The drive installed easily. Formatted easily. But it is much more noisey than my original Western Digital. All I could think of is the old SCSI drives. I don't know if it's defective. Would like to try another.Digital camera Review: WD 640 Black fastest 7200 RPM drive on the planet
Summary: 5 Stars
These drives have been tested to be the fastest 7200 RPM drives on the market. If you do a search, you'll find tests that compare the 640 black to the Raptor, and they are within 10% or less of the speed of the raptor, and on some tests, pretty much dead even.
This review compares the Raptor 150 to the 640 Black, and it compares everything--write, read, transfer, sustained transfer, small file copy, large file, etc:
[...]
If you buy two of these drives and run them in RAID 0, you get smokin' faster transfer rates than a single Raptor.
The upside is that this drive is 80 bucks compared to a raptor at 300. Also, the largest raptor is 300GB while this one is 640GBs. So you get 1.2TBs of space for 160.00 or about half of what a single raptor costs.
Also, the Caviar Blacks are the same build quality as the Enterprise drives, so you get the 5 year warranty. The only difference in this drive and the Enterprise drives is that the latter are tuned for RAID, while the 640 is tuned for desktop use. The tuning for RAID lowers error recovery to 7 seconds, while the error recovery on the 640, like all desktop drives, is a much longer 30+ seconds.
When using RAID, if your drive does happen to find a fault and try to recover it, after about 7 seconds the RAID controller will simply say, "Nope, bad sectors" mark the sectors bad and keep going. They are tuned this way to maximize performance on high volume servers where speed is more important than waiting for a non RAID drive to recover information. Other than that, there is virtually no speed difference between this drive and its Enterprise equivalent.
Digital camera Review: WD 640GB Black
Summary: 5 Stars
I ordered the product from Amazon.com on November 11th and it arrived at my house on November 13th.
Pros:
Best HD you can ever buy. Fast, reliable, and it makes you smile just by its smashing good looks.
Cons:
I am a bit concerned about how they shipped the HD. The product was safely packaged but, the HD is somewhat loose while in its box.
***Other than that there is no reason not to buy this HD. Amazon is the best!!! They give the best price, and are always willing to help its customers instantly.***
I have been with Amazon for a long time and have never had any problems.
Digital camera Review: WD 640GB Caviar Black
Summary: 5 Stars
This drive was purchased to replace a 74GB Raptor. The replacement was made as a part of my switch from XP to WIN 7.
To start, I noticed no reduction in the speed of my system by replacing the older 10K RPM Raptor with the newer 7.2K RPM Caviar. I attribute this to SATA2 and the higher data density on the new drive. I was very pleasantly surprised to find how quiet the new drive is. I guess I never noticed how loud the Raptor was until it was gone.
Amazon's price was the best I could find, if only by pennies.
And, in case anyone else is considering it, WIN 7 is what Vista should have been. I was able to use the upgrade ([...] bucks - thanks, again Amazon) on the new 640GB Caviar to make a nice clean install. How? Install onto the new drive, but skip the part where you input the serial number. Do not activate (I don't think you can, anyway). After installation, REINSTALL from within WIN 7 itself and put the serial number in, this time. Then activate as usual. This avoids any registry editing, etc. YMMV, or course.
If you use a new hard drive when you install WIN 7, leave your previous OS on the old drive. Then, you can always swap drives and easily get back to your old system, should you need to.