Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: it worked OK for 3 years.

Cons: took a hard dump at 3 years. SMART showed major fail
Reported Uncorrectable Errors...
Uncorrectable Sector Count ...
RMAed the sucker

Other Thoughts: they don't make the like the used to...

Pros: Drives are working well. did a throughput test using Passmark performance test 6.1 Seq Read= 185 Mbyte/s Seq Writes = 177 Mbytes/s Rand Seek+RW = 14 Mbytes/s Composte 272 this is a great number for a $62 7200 rpm drive.

Cons: The little sad part, is that I had to return 3 of the drives for failure right out of the box. I'm not sure why box was in good shape and packed well. NewEgg as always was right there with an RMA. Shipped them back just waiting the return.

Other Thoughts: 1.Intel BOXDX48BT2 LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX
2.Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield 2.83GHz
3.OCZ Special Ops 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
4.POWERCOLOR AX4870 512MD5-RM Radeon HD 4870 512MB
5.Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB
6.ZALMAN ZM750-HP 750W Continuous @ 45°C (Maximum Continuous Peak:850W)
7.ZALMAN PROFESSIONAL GS-1000-BK Black Computer Case Aluminum
8. Vista Ultimate 64

Pros: Awesome. Benchmarks in RAID-0 basically double a single drive. About 120~140MBPS where single sata2 is gonna be about 50 to 70.

I keep a single sata2 drive for docs, music, websites backups if something happens.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: I installed Vista HP x64 in 10 minutes, 15 to be fair. I was amazed. DFI Lanparty x48 board.

NOTE: Please do get actual sata2 cables, the thin red ones do not shield or carry data up to sata2 specs, seems manufacturers like to give them away though...I buy ones marked sata2 and think they could still be better.

Pros: After 2 failed attempts with new Seagate drives out of the box, WD wins the prize this time!

I was able to install the drive, partition and format and start start restoring data within 10 min. this is something that the 2 Seagate drives failed to do...

Cons: none at this time..

Other Thoughts: I own 12 SG drives and this is my ist wd in a long time

Pros: Western Digital is still the best hard drive manufacturer, but their business execs should make better decisions about recalling.

Cons: Turns out a few of these YS models have a glitch in the firmware that drop the drive off RAID, making it disappear without reporting it, if there are any errors encountered while running the “Data Lifeguard” process. Instead of issuing a recall on the drives, Western Digital decided to issue a firmware upgrade that involves booting from the update file on a bootable medium to the disk, then executing the update in command prompt. Luckily, I'm using this model disk as a slave drive for storage, so I can just frequent device manager and scan for hardware changes to make it show up, every bootup.

Other Thoughts: I appreciate WD implementing the “Data Lifeguard” process that enhances the operational life expectancy, but perhaps it's not their strong point.

I'll keep buying WD HDDs, but I'll do more research to make sure it's not one of their "lemon" models.

Pros: Fast and sturdy I purchased 2 of these for a client to protect and it was a breeze setting up a raid 1 for him good warrenty also

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: dito

Pros: Fast... Great rebuild rate...

Cons: Out of the 8 drives that I originally purchased 3 were DOA. It is now 7 months later and 2 seperate drives are causing continuous rebuilding on 2 different raid sets. Fortunately I purchased additional drives for this reason and will be getting with WD for replacements. So 5 of the 8 drives have gone bad in less than a year.

Other Thoughts: In a RAID configuration be it either RAID0+1 or a 4 drive RAID5 the speed of this drive is outstanding. especially in a file server environment with 50+ users.

I gave it 2 stars due to the high failure rate, but the drive itself (when it works) is a very good.

Pros: These drives perform well with a sii3114 SATA controller by forcing SATA 150 mode (OPT1 jumper). I was enticed to purchase these drives over others due to the heavy duty cycle rating and RAID affinity. Both drives shipped with the updated firmware of 20.06C06 so a manual firmware update was unnecessary.

Cons: It appears one of the drives is already registering SMART errors (Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Current_Pending_Sector, Offline_Uncorrectable) relating to sector readability. The drive has dropped out of the RAID-1 array after a mdadm checkarray as well. I was able to resync the array to uniform without issue.

Other Thoughts: Drives sit in front of a 120mm fan and there is adequate ventilation with a medium duty cycle. Glad these come with a 5 year warranty. I'll continue to run the "ailing" drive until it is consistently kicked out of the array or I see Reallocated_Sector_Ct incrementing. Thus far the RAW count is two from smartctl.

I'm rating these drives as fair due to one of the two already registering SMART errors.

The failing drive is roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the other and neither drive has exceeded 96F even during heavy I/O.

2.6.24 Kernel, sii3114

Pros: Have always owned WD drives. Some of the best drives out there and are very stable with a high MTBF rate.

Cons: None! Best HDD's out there in my opinion. Bought 2 of these running in Raid 0.

Other Thoughts: WELL worth the money per Gig.

Pros: Had 2 of these in Raid 0 for about 1 year now. They are quiet and fast. No heat problems, but my case does have a 120mm fan in front of them.

Cons: Price was a bit more than other 250GB last year, this year you can get more than 2x the size for the same price as these drives.

Other Thoughts: Mine came last year with the newer firmware, no need to upgrade as another reviewer said. No raid issues so far (cross fingers).