Western Digital WD5000KSRTL/WD5000AAKS Caviar 500 GB SATA Hard Drive by Western Digital
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Digital camera reviews of Western Digital WD5000KSRTL/WD5000AAKS Caviar 500 GB SATA Hard Drive
Digital camera Review: I'm sold on SATA!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Strange title, I know.
I come from the old days of required jumper settings and IDE cables. It's been years since I touched the inside of a desktop tower so this was a total shock to my system. BTW, it's a Dell Inspiron 530. It already has a 500GB drive, which I've effectively filled up, which was why I bought this drive...to store some of my extra stuff, but also to act as a backup location for my laptop.
Installing the drive was a snap. Dell set this tower up to accommodate this type of drive. Just slide it into the HDD1 bay, use the WD SATA cable into one of the slots on the motherboard - just like HDMI, actually - and then give it power. Its assignment showed up in the BIOS right away. That's the hardware side. I left the jumper off (Default), and it's perfoming fine.
Next, the software side. Vista Premium picked up the drivers right away and got them installed. Next, Disk Management, initialized the disk, then set up the simple partition. Total install time was about 15 minutes, give or take a few minutes.
As a side note, if you have a home network and you're not performing scheduled backups of your primary computer's data, you need to start, and this drive is a great way to get this done.
Digital camera Review: It works!
Summary: 5 Stars
The hardware installed easily in about 5 minutes. It took another 15-20 minutes for me to figure out how to configure the drive under Windows Vista... all of which was OK once I found the right screen and learned the lay of the land under Vista. Getting to the right places to have Vista recognize the hard drive, format it, and assign it the drive letter I wanted was the greater challenge, but everything worked without a hitch.
It is GREAT to have a HUGE amount of storage space available on a second hard drive. I am using it to store all my photos, plus backups of data on my primary hard drive. Good product at a good price.
Digital camera Review: Just died 5 months out of warranty
Summary: 2 Stars
Drives fail. I know that. Was using this along with a 500GB Maxtor in a 1TB RAID0 array, with a nice cool fan, I might add. It is amazing to me that we accept such short warranty periods for modern hard drives. Their "Customer Loyalty Program" Will offer to sell me a new drive for $97. You must be joking! I'm going to buy a Seagate with a 5 year warranty and upgrade to a RAID5 array so that next time a drive fails I have redundancy.Digital camera Review: NOT the retail version with cable, software, etc.
Summary: 2 Stars
I have not even installed this yet and I'm angry already. I've had good experiences with WD drives so I expect this one will be fine. What I'm NOT fine with is the fact that the retail package does NOT come with the cable and utility software. I could have bought the OEM version cheaper elsewhere.Digital camera Review: Not too happy
Summary: 3 Stars
The hard drive was not packaged too well, just floating around in the outer box. Also it may not work. I tried it on one of my computers and it was not reconized.