Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Green SATA 3 Gb/s Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AADS

I recently built a new Windows 7 Core i7 system with some new parts and some old ones from my prior system. Since my last computer had hard drives with a couples years under their belt, I opted for two new 500GB 7200RPM Western Digital SATA Green drives. The investment in my data's security was well worth the outlay. I couldn't be happier. They are silent in my CPU's case (seriously, I can't even feel them if I rest my toes against the case during read/write operations) and speedier than any hard drive I've owned before. The plan is to keep these until the price point of solid state disk drives falls to around traditional hard drive prices. I figure that time will be around when the world ends in 2012... if you believe in that nonsense. ;p

I just installed this last night as a backup drive.

I bought it to replace my 2006 WD primary drive, but the packaging was so bad, I thought I better test it first.

I have all Western Digital drives and was able to download a program from them that makes adding or changing drives a snap.(Acronis)

The second program(Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows) does a nice job of checking connected drives for errors and performance. And it monitors for pending failures.

I was a little shocked to see no molex power connector on this drive. Luckily my 2006 PC has a power supply with sata power plugs available. I also had to flip flop the data cables because my old secondary drive used a WD connector (Connect 1) that covered the sata power port on this drive. WD sells a Connect 2 cable for $10 that does not cover the power port. Also, Amazon offers sata data cables and molex to sata power adapters. The retail version might include some cable...Read more

Purchased two of these to use as a mirrored external backup drive. Performance, while nice, isn't critical to me (since it's all going through a USB2 interface anyway), but the noise level and power consumption is. After my Seagate drive died (they're not even worthy of a link to their product. Point is: don't buy SeaGate as their firmware likely is still riddled with bugs that they'll release an update for...after you've lost all your data.)

At any rate, after formatting these drives and doing a series of tests for integrity, these seem to be up to the standard of all the other Western Digital drives I've purchased in the past. They run on low power, cool, and very quiet - the fan in the external enclosure is far louder than both these drives combined. Copying data to and from the drive was flawless, and, while not as fast as many other drives on the market, if you're looking to save power and/or it's going into an external enclosure anyway (and speed doesn't...Read more