Western Digital 500GB EIDE Internal Hard Drive, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache, Retail Box (WD5000JBRTL)

My HDD on my Dell that is about five years old started to fail, and I needed a new HDD. But with a computer that is five years old, I didn't want to put too much money into because I will be buying a new computer soon. At $64, including free shipping, this HDD was actually cheaper than some smaller drives.

Before installing the HDD in my computer, I ran Steve Gibson's SpinRite 6.0 program (in another computer) to test the entire disk. It took 32 continuous hours, but not one error was reported. The temperature of the HDD did not go over 100 degrees, and at the end of the test was around 96 degrees. Another older drive that I tested had a temperature that went up to about 112 degrees during a shorter period.

This is a bare disk drive. No mounting hardware or cables are included (other than a packet of screws). No instructions or user's guide is included, but you can download them from Western Digital's website as well as drive management software...Read more

The HDD worked great the first time and has worked great for a month now. I still have an old motherboard that does not have standard SATA ports and I needed a new larger HDD for my system. I chose this HDD because I wanted an affordable drive with a decent ammount of capacity.

I have it partitioned so that I use a second partition for all program files and data and the first for the OS and certain programs that can only be installed into the primary drive or require certain files be installed in the primary drive ie. CS3. My first partition of 10 GB is running full so if you intend on doing a similar task, go a larger for the first partition.

The drive has worked flawlessly as it should and I intend on using it until it becomes unhealthy, which I hope is a long time.

I have older external HD case not capatible with SATA drives. This IDE drive works fast and flawless. In fact, I have more problems with the newer SATA devices on my vintage Dell XPS M1210 than this IDE device.