Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT
by Western Digital
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT
Customer Review: works great so far!
Summary: 5 Stars
I received my WD Caviar Blue 500GB hard drive today to replace a failing Toshiba HD of equivalent specs.
I used the free trial edition of Terabyte Image for Windows, combined with Sabrent's SATA to USB with Power Supply cable, to seamlessly clone my old drive to the new drive. (Other reviewers mention using the trial edition of Acronis True Image to achieve this, but as of the 2011 edition, the trial no longer supports disk cloning.)
I've never handled an internal hard drive before, but using a No. 1 Philips screwdriver, I easily dismantled my Touchsmart tx2 laptop, located my HD, and removed it. Replacing the HD did require some experimentation (i.e., realizing I had to remove and transfer the case and adapter from the old HD) but happened in quickly, easily, and without disaster.
Thus far, the drive has passed all of the tests I've subjected it to and has failed to produce blue screens as my old Toshiba drive loved to do. Windows Performance Information gives the new drive an excellent disk transfer rating of 7.2 out of 7.9 (the same rating my old HD received).
I've given the product 4-stars pending a long-term test. I'll return in a few months to report how the drive is functioning. In the meantime, it seems reasonably quiet and cool. Here's to hoping my days of the frequent blue screen have passed!
UPDATE: It is now April 2011 and the drive is running flawlessly; it's already out-lasted the drive my laptop came with. I've updated the rating to 5 stars.
Customer Review: Buy Western Digital or Nothing!
Summary: 5 Stars
I was using Western Digital ever since I had Packard Bell Desktop PC. Western Digitals have long since been the dominant brand for computing parts, but especially Hard Drives.
I bought this because I thought my crappy Fujitsu Hard Drive went silent due to receiving the Blue Screen of Death. I could not believe that such a thing could happen as fast (I mean c'mon it's Microsoft...I'm not gullible, just a bit shell-shocked) to a laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate! So I checked, and fiddled until I discovered that I simply needed to start all over again with Windows 7 Ultimate. Turns out that a Microsoft Update caused my BSOD, and made me think it was my hard drive that failed. Well, I had already ordered this puppy, and do you think I was going to switch back to my pre-installed Fujitsu piece of crap, even though it is 320GB?! Oh no! I only installed the bare necessities and set Windows 7 Ultimate to self activate within three days since my Hard Drive was coming in half that time span. Well, UPS came, and now I'm suped-up with 500GB of Hard Disk space, 1GB of Video RAM (not shared), Intel Duo Core, 4GBs of RAM all on a Toshiba laptop computer. I think now OCZ Technology, Raedeon, and Western Digital work in perfect harmony!
Note: you are getting 465GB after formation of drive.
This is a very affordable, great upgrade for your notebook, and I gather PS3, although I believe laptop should always have precedence over any gaming console, and that is why I will try to upgrade my 250GB PS3 to a 320GB PS3. Cannot wait until WD release a 1TB HDD for laptops.
Customer Review: Simple, basic, reliable, and does the job.
Summary: 5 Stars
It's your everyday replacement laptop/ps3 hard drive. Arrived well packed, and faster than anticipated with free shipping. I paired it with 2.5" USB 2.0 SATA Hard Drive HDD Case Enclosure - Black in my purchase. My old hdd that was in my ps3 went into the enclosure in the end. You will need a third party fat32 formating program if you are using XP or above.
My upgrade went like this:
*Installed new 500gb drive into enclosure
*Connected the enclosure to my pc and formatted it with [...]
*Google for ridgecrop gui fat32 if the link doesn't show up
*Connected enclosure to ps3 and backed up uusing the backup utility.
*Synced my trophies as they are not part of the backup
*Connected the enclosure to my PC and copied the unprotected data to my PC
*Opened up the ps3 and exchanged the hard drives
*Formatted and ran disk check on my old ps3 hdd. A couple of sectors were marked bad and unusable.
*Copied the ps3 backup data back to the old hard drive in the enclosure.
*Copied the latest ps3 system update to the hdd in the enclosure
*Connected the enclosure to the ps3 and installed the update so the ps3 recognized the new hdd
*Backed up the new 500gb hdd.
*Done
I picked the 5200rpm drive and that enclosure because they would not need to take up both usb ports. Overall an easy product installation
Customer Review: MAC USERS READ, Great drive for NEW Unibody MacBook
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this drive a few a days ago to install in my new unibody macbook. 500gb is just what I need to for all the music and vids. I am very impressed both with the ease of installation (apple) and the performance of the drive (WD). Installation was a snap, just followed the apple instructions making sure to back up my data to time machine first of course then one screw on the macbook (#0 Philips) and 4 on the drive (T6 torx) and plug in the eSATA and done! (wish someone had told me the sizes of the screws as my 250pc tool set did not have anything this small, but ACE hardware did for about 8 bucks for both.
There was one little hiccup when I installed the drive and went to install Leopard it could not find the new drive to mount to. Luckily there is a limited tool bar at this stage and I selected "Disk Utility" from it. On a guess I erased the drive and formated it MAC-OS (Journaled) when that was done (about 30 seconds) drive was recognized and I was off to the install!
Installed OS-X and let it do it's thing for about 30-45 minutes, it asked me if I wanted to restore from time machine selected the drive and DONE! (Note when you startup from the new HD you get a folder with a question mark, insert the Leopard install disc and it work from there (takes about 2-3 minutes to read disk and boot)
Drive: Drive is super quite and does not get hot, I would say performs the same if not better than the OEM drive (250gb). Hope this was helpful and enjoy!
Customer Review: amazing!! perfect for my macbook pro
Summary: 5 Stars
i just purchased a 13" unibody (late 2009) macbook pro, and when i was prompted to configure it at the apple site i saw the prices and was blown away and what they charged for hard drives, for half the price of what apple was going to charge i got this bad boy and put it in myself :-) i also installed my own ram (Crucial CT2KIT25664BC1067 4GB 204-PIN PC3-8500 SODIMM DDR3 Memory KIT (2GBx2)) and i suggest you do the same if youre thinking about buying a macbook or macbook pro
i have an external 1tb usb hard drive by western digital and love their products, especially their internal drives, i always choose them over seagate when i build custom pc machines
initially when i ordered this product it was a dud and wouldnt mount (show up), so i did an exchange with amazon and they sent me another with 1day shipping, great service, so i got the 2nd drive, threw it into SATA to USB enclosure (Vantec NexStar NST-D100SU 2.5-Inch/3.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 and eSATA Hard Drive Dock (White)) and it worked, a couple minutes later reformatted the drive and cloned my existing hard drive on this 500gb one using Super Duper 2.5, and booya, ready for the hard drive swap
works amazing and i recommend it to anyone looking for a larger hard drive for their macbook/pro