Western Digital - 500GB Internal Hard Drive

Purchased this large capacity drive for an older system that did not have a SATA interface. At 500 MB, this appears to be the largest capacity IDE (PATA) drive available. The performance is fine and installation easy, but I could have also purchased an IDE-to-SATA adapter and a more common SATA drive for about the same price. Higher capacity SATA drives are available at a lower cost per GB price. I've used both strategies and would probably go the IDE-to-SATA adapter with SATA drive route in the future when upgrading older computers with large capacity drives. It would allow migration of the drive to newer system if I ever retired my old system.

I purchased this hard drive for my wife's computer because of previous good experiences with Western Digital drives and I needed an EIDE connection. Her 5 year old computer came with only an 80 GB drive and it was filled to 85% of its capacity. This was causing her computer to slow down and behave sluggishly because of limited space for pagefile swapping and applications running in the background like antivirus software. I could not even use the Disk Defragmenter because of insufficient freespace available on the hard drive. Even with DSL it was taking a long time to bring up the Internet and her email application. I installed this new drive using downloadable software (Acronis True Image) from Western Digital's website that facilitated creating an image of the entire old hard drive including the operating system and installed software. When I was done all I had to do was swap cable connections and jumper pins on the old and new drives. The computer booted up normal the first time with the new drive and the applications are now running very fast. I am extremely pleased with the performance of this hard drive but recommend keeping the old drive in a safe place for a few months to make sure everything continues to work. I would definitely recommend this as a replacement drive for anyone having an EIDE cable connection. Oh yes, the drive was very reasonably priced.

Overall I am happy with the 2 drives I purchased. Each has clocked 400 hrs of on time with about 350 startups. When I got the drives I checked their SMART status to see where I was beginning and they were both rated at between 94 and 96% which I believe means each drive came with a few factory errors and block reassignments which is normal. I have not seen any degradation since my first check. These 2 500 GB drives replaced 2 Hitachi 250GB drives with SMART ratings approaching 75. I noticed no slowdown with the drive change and in some instances noticed software load times decrease. When I opened the retail boxes they were bare drives without any CD or cables which was not a problem for me, just be aware of it. You can download software(Data Lifeguard) for duplicating drives from the WD website if upgrading.

After limping along with multiple small hard drives and still running low on space, I decided to invest a little money and upgrade my pretty old desktop system to see if I could keep it going for a while longer. This hard drive seemed to have a lot of storage for the price and had the added advantage of being bundled with Acronis True Image software to help in the upgrade process. Although there was some drama in upgrading my motherboard drives to support larger than 144Gbyte drives, after that it was just took some time for the Acronis software to make a duplicate image of my existing C drive, but everything went pretty smoothly. System now operates just like it used to, but now I have a lot more storage space!

I would definitely recommend this hard drive for anyone that wishes to upgrade their hard drive in that old computer. It included the screws to attach it to the hard drive mounting brackets and was installed in the case within three minutes. I had one of Western Digital's Caviar series hard drives for over ten years and it is still going strong. If you are looking for a reliable one, well, look no further.

This was a great choice for a machine that was limited to the IDE (PATA) bus. Western Digital includes the utility to ghost the drive to your new drive, which makes the transition much easier. While it's a great price, the cache is limited to 8MB so performance isn't as great as it could have been, but it's still pretty speedy for an IDE drive. Always have had great success with WD drives, so far this one is working well. Keeping my fingers crossed . . .

I have 2 Compaq Evo desktop workstations. These are 2003 vintage. Rather than buy expensive NAS hardware, I opted to upgrade these workstations with large 500GB WD drives. Since my workstations can only handle one internal HDD, I reluctantly removed the old 40 GB hard drives that were running Red Hat Linux, and replaced them with these new WD 500 EIDE drives. No special setup was required (not even changing jumpers since these would be the primary drives). When I booted up the Compaq Evos, the bios immediately recognized the new hdd, and continued to boot. I then inserted the RHEL 5 cd, and off I went. Linux installed without a hitch (which included implementing LVM). The drives are quiet and fast. And Since BestBuy had these drives on sale for $79.99, I couldn't pass up the opportunity (even if that meant removing the old hard drive running linux, and re-installing Linux on the new WD EIDE drives). Installation couldn't have been easier. Bret Draper, UT

Glad to be able to still get high capacity drive with an IDE connection at a local store. I do computer repair and had two jobs back to back where the hard drive on older computers were at full capacity. This drive offers 500GB - a significant amount of space for someone accustom to managing data on a 40GB or 80GB drive Western Digital have been a dependable drive for me but so has Maxtor and Seagate. This drive appears to transfers data quick and quiet. Unless I'm missing the utility on the WD CD that ships with the product, they don't have a utility to clone from the old drive to the new like they did in the past. I use a backup / restore utility to accomplish the task.