Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVE 320GB 5400 RPM 2.5" PATA Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive - OEM

Pros: Great drives, probably your best bet in non SATA drives for a PATA capable laptop or enclosure that should fit in your pocket.

Cons: Runs hot. Makes no difference to the system, but it might worry you.

WD support will not ship you out any PATA caviar blues. I bought this one from Newegg to replace it. It replaced my old one well, have had no issues.

I had to spend another 150 bucks to get a new one, after WD shipped me a refurbed SATA drive of slightly higher size (which promptly began to have bad sectors a few months out of warranty while plugged into the external port on the laptop.) I am not pleased with those, but these PATA drives are spectacular for their intended purpose.

Other Thoughts: Don't accept a refurb SATA if one of these PATA drives goes bad. Get a direct replacement instead, and insist you get something better.

Pros: Fastest IDE drive I have ever used. Great for bringing new life to old an old laptop.

Cons: It only works properly in one of my two laptops. Has problems with sustained read on my Medion MD2900. The drive keeps resetting over and over resulting in a sustained read of 1-2MBps.

The drive works perfectly in my laptop I don't use.

Other Thoughts: 5 eggs because I didn't originally buy the drive for the Medion.

Pros: So far, this replacement drive works. It is not as fast as prior drive (of exact same model), but faster than their 250gb model. My old one (of exact same model) is still going strong 2 years later. Hope this will work in my kid's laptop for just as long.

Cons: Slower than prior drives of exact same PN/Model. My other same model drive is doing 63mb/sec on bare partition 1st 1gb at lowest LBA. Higher LBA is slower), this newer one does about 56mb/sec. Side-by-side boot and app test (same laptop memory and disk) seem to be just as responsive even with slightly slower interface.

Other Thoughts: I took time to write this really to ask you, Newegg, to put a button to allow users to select 4kb "advanced" format vs old universal 512kb format like this one. Not all equipment work with the emulated 512's "Read / Modify / Write". Lazy manufacturers! Could have a jumper/flash to tell the firmware to do 512 or 4k physical verses a amoeba-brain approach of RMW 512 emulation.

Pros: Extremely fast, barely audible drive. Lots of storage space. Excellent choice for older PCs running IDE based drives. Remember this is a bare drive with nothing on it. You need to have your bootable OS software and any other backup software to use it.

Cons: As noted in other reviews, this is quite pricey. Newegg has the best price out there, but if you need it you can't complain. Depending on your OS and file system, you will get around 300GB of free space. Don't expect the full 320GB. Bit of a pain to format and partition, but if you have the right software, it's not too hard.

Other Thoughts: Box arrived at my doorstep severely smashed. Most of the packing peanuts fell out en route. However, the internal box and the drive inside it remained unscathed. Kudos to Newegg's shipping department. Boo to UPS.

Pros: If you have one of the few remaining PATA systems, this is the hard drive for you.

Cons: I honestly cannot think of any.

Other Thoughts: I used this drive two years ago to back up my failing 80 GB hard drive for my hp zd7260us. My computer recently died, so this is now a great external hard drive. I never had a problem with it (and if I remember correctly, it was a little quieter than my old drive).

Pros: None to mention-

Cons: Replaced about 4 of these in oem notebooks for clients over the last few months. Most of these were 1-2 years old of various brands. Ordered this same drive replacement and 2 were bad from the factory with sector issues. Will never buy a blue drive again.

Other Thoughts: Western Digital used to be the hallmark of hard drives back in the day. It seems they have slipped just as several other manufacturers have. Their black drives are still good but at a higher price point as well. Tough times for a tech these days.

Pros: Price was good. Fast shipping and good service. Employees was very helpful!!

Cons: None

Pros: Upgraded my old laptop from 60GB to 300GB.
Cheap.

Cons: None. Well I wish it was a 500GB or 1TB. But it's the largest PATA 2.5" out there.

Other Thoughts: Works fine in my Compaq laptop. No issues.

For those of you with BIOS issues, create a 40-60 GB C: boot partion. Leave the rest unallocated. Load WinXP SP3. Win XP will see the ENTIRE drive even though your BIOS doesn't. Use WinXP Drive management to format the balance of the drive as Drive E.

Pros: I was going to buy one of these for a barebone laptop that I just bought but not now. These used to be about $40 less before that Thailand flooding thing but everyone that sell HDs is going to cash in.

Cons: I don't blame Newegg for cashing in on this but SHAME ON YOU if these were already in stock before the huge price increases cause they could still be sold at the old price.

Other Thoughts: I purchased a barebone laptop online, not from Newegg, my first mistake. It was listed as a Asus TransPort T1300e barebone. It's not Asus, it's MPC which is out of business so good luck on support or parts. It didn't come with a battery (which I can't find one to save my life) or a power supply. No DVD drive and the hard drive and DVD slots are IDE which dosen't make sense on a laptop that take a Intel Core 2 Duo cpu although the only Intel mobile cpu out of 6 different ones that I have that would boot up with is a T1300 Solo. If you see these barebone laptops for sale anywhere, DON'T BUY IT!

Pros: Largest capacity internal hard drive commercially available for older laptops with IDE / PATA / ATA / EIDE hard disk interfaces.

Cons: I've had SEVERAL of these get corrupted with read errors - NO WARNING, not even SMART ERRORS. I've had 2 320GB PATA Drives die now, and at least one 250GB SATA laptop hard disk (WD2500BEVT) all jut start having read errors, and the internal SMART didn't fix it, or warn me. (Yes I turned it on)...

Other Thoughts: I started having problems, slow booting, etc.. Ran everything I could think of to speed the boot process. It wasn't programs running / starting. It was the drive having issues reading, and not report it. Finally I ran a 'chkdsk c: /r' and found the issues... Downloaded WD's newest diags, and it couldn't complete due to too many read errors. But the internal SMART diags still showed everything normal. I think there are probably firmware issues with these drives.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Scorpio Blue, as this is not the typical experience with the product. It is very unfortunate that both of these drives stopped working correctly so soon after your initial use. We stand behind our warranty and will offer replacement product for defective drives, via our RMA process throughout the duration of the product’s warranty. We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience if possible. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a NewEgg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.