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: OK for the money and 3 yr warranty
Summary: 3 Stars
For music, videos in news websites/business articles, or poker games I usually leave my speaker on "all the time."
well, what is ANNOYING is that, there is this "clicking sound" anytime pages are flipped (like reading ads page to page) and the ONLY Solution is to turnoff the speaker.
do yourself a favor -- spend a few more dollars for the 500gb Caviar Black 32mb cache WD5001AALS [mine does not have this annoying clicking sound...] and also get the 5-year warranty!
Digital camera Review: Ok for some
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought this and returned it within 24 hours of receiving it. The product is ok, but I had some problems installing it. Some of these were my mistakes, but I blame them because it camw with no documentaion or cloning software. I had the right SATA connectors on my MB and the right plugs on my power supply. but I had to clone an EIDE (PATA) drive to it and there was no software like Seagate provides to do this. Also no instructions. I had a 2000 version of Norton Ghost and used it. It did the cloning, but without proper instructions, I booted up on the new disk without physically disconnecting the old drive and got the drives cross-linked. I managed to salvage the old drive and redid the process correctly, but my old chipset couldn't handle the size of this drive with one partition. It ran slow and sluggish. I gave up and returned it. Fortunatly I bought it from Amazon directly and they have an amazing return policy. Now, even if I by from the Amazon site, I always check to make sure it is sold and shipped by Amazon. If it isn't, I don't buy it.Digital camera Review: Quiet, Inexpensive
Summary: 5 Stars
I replaced my old drive with this and it is sooo much quieter. It is just the drive so you'll need the SATA cable. It runs very well so far. As far as temperature, it runs around 39 C which is several degrees cooler than my old one in the same spot in the case. Its quite a value for that price.Digital camera Review: Quietest drive I've ever owned
Summary: 5 Stars
The main harddrive in my computer (about 3ish years old. A western digital 250gb SATA drive) was getting full, so I decided to add in a second drive. After shopping around, and reading reviews, I decided to buy the WD5000KSRTL. After installation (which was harrowing. Bios saw the drive just fine, but Windows didn't want to start up. Zero fault of the drive, just a Windows XP quirk according to forums I read) I formatted the drive (took maybe half an hour) and then I was up and running.
I play alot of games, most of which have been bought from the Steam store. The old drive, having been heavily fragmented, was slowing the load times of my games by a pretty high degree. After installing the new drive, I migrated all of my Steam games over to it (a process that was lightning fast, considering it was 10gb or so worth of games. Everything from Counterstrike to Half-Life 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic) and I've come to the conclusion that this is easily the fastest, and the most silent drive I've ever owned. Honestly if I couldn't see the files transferring to the new drive (on the screen) I wouldn't have believed that it was actually in operation. This drive would be perfect for a media center computer (though I'm not using it for that purpose).
There is only one oddity, which might not be an oddity at all. When I looked at the model number on the drive, it was WD5000AAKS. If you take away the "RTL" from the WD5000KSRTL (RTL meaning retail) you are left with WD5000KS, not WD5000AAKS. Reading a few forums, I think this might be an upgraded version of the WD5000KS, though I cannot independently confirm this. Looking at WD's website, the WD5000AAKS seems to be the current model number for this generations 500gb Caviar SATA. A few forums mentioned that the WD5000AAKS is a superior drive, and while I can't speak to that, I can honestly say that the performance I've seen from this particular drive has been spectacular.
Oh and someone earlier said that this box doesn't come with the SATA cable needed to connect this drive to your computer. He is infact half correct. There is no SATA to Molex adaptor included in the box. If you don't know what Molex is, it's the name for the connector that connects computer hardware to the computers power supply. Recently, alot of power supplies have been shipping with SATA power connectors built in (which was the case for me, I got lucky) but if you are using the power supply that came with your computer (from Dell, HP, Gateway etc) you may need to check and make sure you have a SATA power connector on it before you attempt to buy this drive. Unlike alot of drives, this drive cannot be powered by a Molex connector. You may have to buy a Molex to SATA adaptor if this is the case with your power supply. There is however an included SATA data cable, so you won't have to purchase an additional one to install this hard drive (which a few people did unfortunately).
If you are looking for a new drive, that is basically silent, at a good price, this is the drive for you.
Digital camera Review: Really fast and quiet
Summary: 5 Stars
I buy this drive to replace my old IDE hard drives, this is a very fast and silent drive, and it includes the SATA cable with Secure Connect, this is a great product.