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Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS
Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD1001FALS Reviews
This is for people (like me) who’ve never done this before… I use Windows Vista and an HP desktop computer.
1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn’t come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn’t seem noisy.
2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won’t support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don’t get this drive.
3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable – 4pin/2x15pin SATA – 12in. This is a “Y” adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn’t have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.
4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of “rail” for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.
5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.
6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say “locating… installing” or something like that.
7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) – Manage – then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the “drive 1″ (or whatever) designation to make it “online”. Then right click the long color band over the drive’s partition graphic and start the “new simple volume” wizard. Stayed with the defaults.
That’s about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I’ve error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it’s doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.
I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don’t know if this is the same on other PC’s) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn’t. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)
This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!
I bought this drive for my Mac Pro (Mac Pros, at least when I bought mine 3 years ago came from Apple with WD 250 GB hard drives). I have installed about 10 WD drives, upgrading this time form the WD 500GB drives, and this drive with its 32MB cache is indeed a bit faster (10-20 percent) than the 500GB. The ONLY downside at all to this drive is that is a bit louder when the heads are seeking, with the drive seek “clatter” more noticeable than the previous 500GB Western Digitals I just replaced (I needed more storage). Not bad tho–it’s just that my Mac Pro is absolutely silent and I notice the least little additional sound and never really heard the 500′s, the 1TB I hear now–but don’t get me wrong it’s not bad and there certainly is no drive “whine” when idling–these are quite drives. I guess whizzing across 1TB of data is a little more strenuous on the heads. I have bought about 20 Western Digital drives since 2000 and not one has failed on me–unlike LaCie–ick.
I bought two of these. Just an insane price. Thanks, Amazon. The drives are bulk/OEM which means they come with nothing. Just the drives and the anti-static bags. Do your homework. If you want software to hold your hand through a hard drive install, do not buy this drive. If you need screws, rails, or cables, do not buy this drive.
If you want to save some cash while getting an absolutely absurd amount of disk space with SATA2 (3Gbps) plus 32MB of cache (older drives have 4-16MB), then get these drives. They are beasts.
After the Seagate fiasco, I vowed to go with an alternative. Western Digital came through with these monster hard drives. Get one. Get two. You will not be disappointed.
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