Customer reviews for the WD 500GB Caviar Blue SATA-300 7200rpm 16MB

Quiet

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 30/09/2007

Bought 2 of these to use as a RAID 1 mirrored pair with a Dabs Value 4 port SATA RAID PCI card (quicklinx 3Z2QWS). Very pleased as they are much quieter and noticeably faster than the 3 year old Western Digital and Maxtor IDE drives I had in my PC before. Remember you need adapters to power SATA drives if your motherboard has only the old IDE power connectors. Easy to set up and install in Windows XP as extra drive. Had problems cloning my old C drive onto the new mirrored pair with Western Digital Data Lifeguard (encountered errors during clone), Maxtor MaxBlast (clone appeared to work but WinXP hung on booting), Miray HDClone (did not recognise the SATA card). Recommend XXClone (freeware) for this - it was slow but worked.

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WD Raptor

Reviewed by . Review Posted 01/12/2007

Because Raptors are 10,000RPM drives with 4ms seeks. Ideal for gaming, and faster than most desktop drives (New 500gb/1tb have better sustained transfers). You cant beat the Raptor for seek times with any other consumer drives. (Not including Enterprise storage, as we all know that Data is clever.)

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Great once i figured them out

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 11/03/2007

I bought two of these to create a 1TB JBOD RAID array. They did require a jumper in order to be detected by my motherboard but once I had figured that out (took a while!) they run really nice they're quiet compared to my old WD drive. Performance seems to be excellent also.

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great for RAID

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 06/06/2007

I bought 2 of these for my SATA 300 Raid array. lightning fast and very quiet with low vibration were my requirements and these drives surpass my expectations. im currently going to be purchasing some more of these for my network attached storage drive (NAS) for use in 2 of the available bays. and i would be getting the same drives again when it came to expand that array too!

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Outstanding Performance

Reviewed by Rob. Review Posted 21/09/2007

What an amazing drive. It is fast and oh so very quiet. My old 200GB drive sounded like a cement mixer! This one is virtually silent. It is exremely fast too, apps load within mere seconds compared to the old drive. Get one, you will not be disappointed!

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Fab drives

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 09/10/2007

Not sure why Raptor costs twice as much and much more limited storage capacity - but these are outstanding drives and stunning capacity - coupled with good price. I installed 2 x on an Intel-based Apple G5 and configured them as a striped RAID - very capable for HD video on FCP 6. Simply the best for video.

John Nuttall
Media Technician
Howard of Effingham School

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Western Digital Caviar 500GB S300 - Excellent

Reviewed by Billinski. Review Posted 13/07/2007

I bought 2 or these large drives for use in photo & video storage, planning to use one as an internal drive and the other as an external drive.
I considered the more expensive WD500SYS but chose this one based on lower noise and faster data transfer, as well as being a few pounds cheaper.
I was certainly not disappointed, the drives are truly "whisper quiet" as claimed, and transfer speeds are superb (even when using a PCI/SATA card for the external drive).
I would recommend this to anyone, the value in terms of GB/£ is astonishing.

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