Western Digital 1 TB RE3 SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive - WD1002FBYS

When Windoze 10 wound up running very slowly with no viruses or malware found on my wife's machine I decided to move her over to Linux Mint 18. There were a number of issues with Windoze including a printer driver getting broken by a recent Windoze update. Linux on a test run properly identified her printer and worked perfectly.So I made a complete back up with an external 1TB drive but also wanted to keep the old drive with Windoze 10 on it as another backup just in case. I found this drive and it was a decent price.Received it yesterday and installed it in the HP desktop, installed Linux Mint and copied the data back to the new drive.The drive I received appears to be new, and doesn't show any errors so far but I'm going to be running some additional tests and will try registering with with WD for warranty.As always, make sure you have good backups since any drive can fail at any time, but so far this drive is looking really good and my wife's system is now running at least 10 times faster than it was with Windoze 10 on it.So if you are having performance issues with Windoze or just don't like Windoze checking in with the mothership you should check out Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) And this hard drive appears to be a very good deal.

I ordered two of these drives to run a RAID 1 configuration in a new workstation being built. I specifically got them because of their product specifications for RAID arrays. I am running them under Windows 7 Professional x64 after downloading the latest drivers from Intel and loading them up from a USB drive during the Windows 7 install. These drives run really fast - I get almost instantaneous loading of Microsoft Office.I ordered from Amazon, instead of my usual PC parts place, because of concerns about packaging. My usual supplier ships OEM drives wrapped in two or three layers of bubble wrap and them placed loose inside the shipping box. Amazon packed each drive in its own box with the drive held suspended inside the box by two black plastic (recyclable!) clamshells. These two boxes were then packed inside the actual shipping box. Good job Amazon! Properly protective and recylcable packaging.One thing to be aware of for checking out these drives for errors. I personally use Spinrite 6 for checking drive surfaces. Once you put these drives in an array, Spinrite 6 will not check them. I believe you can unplug the SATA cable for each drive and check it individually, but I have not verified this. What you CANNOT do is to use the RAID configuration utility to remove the drives from the array, check them for errors, and them return them to the array. If you do this, the RAID configuration utility will reformat them when putting them into the array.

I bought two of these to use in a QNAP TS-212P NAS array, since it was on QNAP's approved drive list. I was a little nervous when I received the drives and the mfg date on the drives was in 2009, but they installed with no problems and I have burned them in for about 30 hours. They provide good response time in a RAID-1 set, and now my home files are secure and accessible from any device in the house. I get about ~400Mbps write speed to the drive pair on a GigE connection, and the full 100Mbps on a 100Mbps connection for a large file write.These drives are a little bit loud, but I like that they are an enterprise grade SATA drive, and I trust the Western Digital name since I have always had good reliability from their products.You really can't beat these for the price. I saved about $50 vs buying a pair of some other type of 1TB drive.UPDATE: Original post above was from December 2013. I just bought another pair of these drives in Aug 2021 to replace the two original drives that have been running flawlessly in my QNAP TS-212P for almost 8 years. I removed a drive, installed the new one, let it rebuild the mirror from RAID, and then did the remaining drive. Now I have two new drives and maybe another 8 years worth of flawless service ahead. Great product...

First, warranty. I recently read - in a couple of places, including here - that WD warrants their drives from date of manufacture. I've bought WD drives for years and never knew that - but then I've never needed their warranty, either. Still, when the ad says "5 year warranty," most people probably expect to be able to *use* the item that long before the warranty is up.Second, speed. According to hdparm - admittedly only a rough indication of only one parameter (buffered reading) - my other drives, Samsung HD103UJ with the same size buffer, are about 30% faster. The WD is also noisier, not that that's a significant issue in this application. My Samsungs were some of the firstborn from the marriage of Seagate and Samsung, and were made in China (earlier Samsungs were Korean, and this WD is from Malaysia). Given that heritage, maybe the WD1002FBYS will redeem itself with longer life.Third, packaging. I've bought between 2 and 3 dozen WD drives over the last 20+ years, and I can't recall another that didn't arrive in a heat-sealed antistatic bag with a little silica gel packet. This one was packaged in a generic antistatic bag sealed with a paper sticker and no silica gel. I know, it's advertised as "bulk," but so were many of the others. That, and the light scratches on the drive's case, makes me wonder about this drive's history.None of these is enough to disqualify the drive, and let's be fair - a bit more than seven sawbucks for a 1tb "Enterprise" drive is a pretty respectable deal, even if the warranty is nearly 80% gone. Back in 1993 my 256mb (that's MEGAbytes) WD drive was over 4 times that. We've come a long way.