Pros: N/A

Cons: N/A

Other Thoughts: For those complaining about incompatibility, slow speeds, or other issues with drives that end in EARS: This is an 'Advanced Format' drive, which uses 4kB sectors instead of the normal 512B sectors older drives use. This results in better space efficiency. However Windows XP (and apparently TiVo) doesn't work well with the new block size. It can be switched back using a jumper, or you can use a program to realign it. More information can be found by checking Wikipedia article on "Advanced Format" and viewing external links.

Unfortunately Newegg doesn't explain this in the product description. Hopefully this review will help.

Pros: -Large capacity, formats to 1.81TB
-Very quiet, I can't hear it at all
-64MB of cache, which is great for multitaskers

Cons: As expected with a power saving hard drive, the performance is lacking when compared to 7200rpm drives.

Other Thoughts: Here are my HD Tune 2.55 results on this HD.
Access Time = 19.2ms
Burst Rate = 149.7MB/s
CPU Usage = -1.0%
Average transfer rate = 84.8MB/s
Minimum transfer rate = 48.3MB/s
Maximum transfer rate = 119.8MB/s

Pros: High capacity, virtually silent, produces almost no heat, and impressive speed: sustained 100MB/s on both read and write.

Cons: Doesn't make coffee in the morning?

Other Thoughts: These drives are not slow! The reviewers claiming so have likely messed up the partition alignment - EARS drives are advanced format with 4k blocks, and you have to make sure that your partitions are aligned with the 4k blocks.

If you don't align them properly (and most disk partitioning software fails at this), you will be spending over 1/2 of your write speed compensating for the poor alignment.

Western digital has a tool available from their site to help get alignment right, but I recommend just using GNU's parted (available for download on the excellent UBCD), and specifying the partition start in sectors, making sure to use a multiple of 8 (4k physical blocks / 512byte logical blocks = 8).

For instance, to format the drive with a single large partition, leaving space for a GRUB boot loader at the start of the disk, you would run:

bash$ parted
>> mkpart primary ext4 64s -1s

Pros: Runs slightly quieter, cooler and more energy-conserving than other models such as the Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB.

Cons: Slower than other drives such as the Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB and this "Caviar Green" series seem to have some major problems...

Bought 2 drives:

Drive #1 had massive bad sectors.
1. A full/complete format could not complete in Windows.
2. Windows CHKDSK reported lots of bad sectors.
3. Western Digital's own software "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" could not finish it's scan and gave the message "too many bad sectors".

(Unfortunately, bad sectors seem to be the theme for many Western Digital hard drives these days. Example: I purchased 5 different models of the Passport Elite portable hard drives, tested all and all had bad sectors!)

Drive #2 failed to report SMART info and the serial number in the "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" software after about a week or two.

BOTTOM LINE: If you discover your drive has even 1 "tiny" bad sector, return it! If you don't, you'll likely "pay for it" later on.

Other Thoughts: Whenever you purchase new hard drive:

1. ALWAYS do a full/complete format and NOT a "quick" format on it.

2. ALWAYS run a CHKDSK with surface test/scan on it.

Go to the drive in Windows, right click while pointing to it with the mouse then go to:

1. Properties
2. Tools
3. Error Checking
4. Click on "Check Now" button
4. Make sure both options are checked; "automatically fix file system errors" and "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors".

On this drive, a full/complete format and a CHKDSK with surface test/scan will take about 6 hours each. To me, it is an absolute MUST!

Read the CHKDSK report. If you cannot find it, search for "find chkdsk report" to find out how.

When bad sectors appear, it means the beginning of problems for a hard drive and possibly even it's death.

It's better to invest several hours (just leave it there by itself) to test like this rather than to waste your money and to get more headaches later when you need to salvage and save y

Pros: Large drive. Good for archiving data

Cons: People say it is slow. It should be used for archiving not for speed. If you want fast hard drives then buy fast hard drives and raid 0 them

Other Thoughts: I notice more and more people buying large hd's and using them for the main drive in the computer and then complaining when it is slow. People need to do there setups correct. Buy good solid fast hard drives for your os/games/apps and buy a huge hard drive to archive and backup data that doesn't need to be accessed all the time. People also needs to realize that non raid spec hard drives are going to fall off your raid arrays. This is due to the raid controllers having a timeout on them that causes the controller to mark the drive as failed if it doesnt respond quick enough. Raid spec hard drives log an error to the controller before the time out so they don't drop off the raid array. Don't buy these for a raid array buy the raid spec ones, and don't buy raid spec if your not running a raid. People will save a lot of head ache if they get the right drives for what they are doing.

Pros: 4k cluster size (advanced format which will become the new standard for HDDs by 2014). Quiet, cool running (32 C in my system) large, fast for a 5,900 RPM drive, economical storage ($139 with free shipping -$30 rebate with promo code EMCYTNS23 (ends 6/27/2010) = $0.06/Gig!

Here is some speed data on the drive as compared to others on my system:

a = Seagate 7200.12 ST31000528AS (1.0 TB) spinning at 7200 RPM
b = WD Black WD1001FALS (1.0 TB) spinning at 7200 RPM
c = WD Green WD20EARS (2.0 TB) spinning at 5900 RPM

# hdparm -Tt /dev/sd[a-c]

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 15512 MB in 1.99 seconds = 7780.21 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 338 MB in 3.02 seconds = 112.07 MB/sec

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 15796 MB in 1.99 seconds = 7922.77 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 308 MB in 3.01 seconds = 102.20 MB/sec

/dev/sdc:
Timing cached reads: 15128 MB in 1.99 seconds = 7586.77 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 356 MB in 3.01 seconds = 118.

Cons: Firmware from WD causes the drive to attempt to park read heads once every 8 seconds which is completely useless and adds wear to the system in my opinion. You can see this reflected in the "Load_Cycle_Count" parameter as read by any SMART compatible reader such as smartmontools.

Linux users can disable this "feature" using hdparm like so:

hdparm -S 242 /dev/sdX

You'll have to add that to your /etc/rc.local for it to survive a reboot. Have a look at the hdparm man page for more. Why WD has this set to 8 seconds is utterly beyond me which is why I only gave it 4/5 in the rating. It is easily fixed as I outlined above.

Other Thoughts: The 'advanced format' feature of this drive reduces overhead by using 4 kilobyte sectors instead of the traditional 512 byte sectors. The old format gave a format efficiency of 87%. Advanced Format results in a format efficiency of 96% which increases space by up to 11%.

The user MUST align the partition(s) of the hdd manually! Linux users need to use fdisk to create partitions as so:

Start fdisk /dev/sdX and set 'c' and 'u' to disable DOS compat and enable sectors. Now create partition 1 with starting sector of 2048 (this is the default with the current version of fdisk which at the time I wrote this review is 2.17.2). Note the last sector used for partition 1. Start partition 2 with the next sector value up from the last sector in partition 1 that is divisible by 8 Eg.

p1 = 2048 - 4096
p2 = 4104 - whatever (4104 is the next value after 4096 that is divisible by 8)
and so on...

Alternatively, start fdisk with the following and partition as normal:

fdisk -H 224 -S 56

Pros: I've owned these for nearly a month. I purchased 3 drives, for use in an mdadm RAID5 array under Ubuntu Linux. Maybe I just had good luck, but NONE of the three were DOA. I ran an extensive read/write test with badblocks on the drives before setting up the array (better to stress them to failure than to have them fail a week into real use), and I was happy to find that there were NO bad blocks reported. These drives are QUIET, barely make noise, and even after hours of spinning are only mildly warm. I did not test the performance of the individual drives, but once set up as a RAID5, they performed quite admirably, doing better than my previous 5400 RPM drives.

Cons: If you're looking for speed, look elsewhere. I wouldn't boot off these drives or load applications from them. But for storing media or running a RAID array, who cares.

Other Thoughts: Here's the output from running Bonnie++ on a newly-formatted ext3 partition on top of 3xdrives in a RAID5:

Version 1.03c ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
___ 6G 55939 84 64222 15 38173 8 65355 88 114797 10 198.0 0
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++
___,6G,55939,84,64222,15,38173,8,65355,88,114797,10,198.0,0,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

Pros: Very quiet, very efficient, stabile.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I purchased 8 of them all at once from newegg. They are being used in an UnRaid server set up and I used the preclear script which runs intensive tests on the drives to make sure they won't fail. I ran the script on all 8 drives for 2 weeks straight and not one of them failed and all performed very well. These are definitely good quality 2TB drives.

Pros: Drive is still alive and kicking in my WHS set-up.

Cons: None

Pros: Bought one of these last week, for the price i got it for the 2tb is waay worth it. Thinking of getting another.

Cons: - When i bought it i had to replace 2 and finally the 3rd one was good. Do the following:

Download the WD hdd data diagnostic tool and use a program like hd tune pro.
1. take screen of s.m.a.r.t info, 2. In WD diagnostic tool right click on the new hdd and choose run diagnostic, then select write zeros (full erase), 3. after full write zeros is done choose extended test. When complete compare the new s.m.a.r.t data with the old one you took at the beginning.
Items of importance are:

Reallocated Sector Count
Reallocated Event Count
Current Pending Sectors
Reported UNC Errors
Offline Scan UNC Sectors

If any of these has a RAW value other than ZERO (0), you should RMA this drive.

cont Other thoughts

Other Thoughts: If they are all 0, your drive is fine. Just have a cursory check on the remaining SMART RAW values and see if there are any changes in any of them. DMA Errors, Off-Track Errors, High-Fly Writes, etc... might be problematic... but when you have these, you have problems with the items above too, so you would notice If you have a program like hd tune pro, you can also try running the error scan instead of extended test. With other software i'm not sure. But this is the way i found that 2 hdd's where in very bad shape. Good luck

Pros: Massive, cool, quiet.

Cons: Not 3TB? ;-)

Other Thoughts: My WD20EARS would randomly disconnect from my WD TV Live box, and would not accept files larger than 2GB. Problem was fixed when I reformatted using Windows 7's default allocation size rather than the 64kb size I use for WDxxEADS drives. Since I made that change it has run continuously without a hitch and accepts any size file.

Pros: Very quiet

Cons: None (yet)

Other Thoughts: This drive went in the 4th bay of a 2008 Mac Pro, and is completely dedicated as a Time Machine backup. As such, I kept my expectations in check, knowing that I didn't need speed from this drive. And since it's just a backup drive, the reliability factor wasn't crucial either (although all my drives have been WD for the past 12 years and I have yet to personally experience a premature drive failure from them, I know I'm pushing my luck though!)

Having said that, I've been waiting for it to go bonkers like a number of other users have reported, but so far it hasn't failed me. It does run once every hour for a few minutes around the clock, so it gets somewhat consistent use. Only about 50% of the drive has been used so far, but it's overall performance has been quite adequate for my needs.

As a dedicated back-up drive, I highly recommend.

Pros: Capacity, Price, Quietness, Low Temperature

Cons: Writing speed is unexpectedly slow

Other Thoughts: 1. This drive is not intended to be a system drive, so please keep this in mind.

2. I'm using 2 of these drives as my external back up drives, changing them every 2 weeks. And for this purpose they are perfect, except the initial load took about 12 hours(!) :)

3. Some people may experience the following problem with the drives 1Tb+ after computer resumes from sleep - the drive becomes unavailable and disappears from device manager. There are two solutions to fix it:

a) In the BIOS POWER settings there is ACPI 2.0 disabled by default. Just enable it. ACPI 2.0 allows the OS enhanced control of the power management function. It looks like the HDD may be going into a low power state and the OS is not getting the message and is not restarting the drive after resume.

b) If the first solution doesn't fix your problem, then there is a fix by Microsoft (it blue screens only if the HDD is your OS drive, otherwise the drive just disappears): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/97

Pros: quiet, inexpensive, 64MB cache, large capacity

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: I bought this HD to add more capacity for my HP WHS. Plugged it in, formatted it and... it worked well. So far I have had no problem.. whatsoever. I hesitated to buy it since some people in this forum had some bad experience with it such as DOA, overheat issue, cracking noise,... However, I decided to buy just 1 drive because it was discounted and promoted with $129.

It was delivered on time and the package was nicely packed. Newegg always does a good job on delivering and packaging.

After 2 weeks running, I have none of those above issue. I regret not to buy 2 more of this. Well, I just wait for a while to see if newegg has a promotion.

Pros: It's 2TB, it's cheap. It has low power consumption. The RMA process is really easy, and web based.. So when yours dies it's easy to get replaced.(Assuming you don't need your data.)

Cons: VERY high failure rate. Mine arrived DOA, so did a lot of other people's. The head's on this hard drive park every 8 seconds for lower power consumption, that also makes things wear out A LOT faster. There's no way to disable this activity.

Other Thoughts: The failure rate seems to be extreme. Mine arrived with bad sectors, then I read reviews and it seems a truly staggering amount of people had the same experience.

Pros: Large drive, low cost, low power

Cons: Failed after about 24 hours usage

Other Thoughts: My HTPC is well ventilated, no overclocking or any non-standard use. Hard drive functioned perfectly for 24 hours, and after a Windows Update, no longer boots, and is only visible in the BIOS on occasion, and will disconnect after being powered for more than 1 minute.

Pros: Ordered two. Neither DOA, no issues, no strange noises. SMART parameters all look good. Also NewEgg packaged in separate internal boxes with individual padding which is far better than the bubble wrap of orders past.
These drives seem great for most uses, provided you are aware of any implications that the 4k advanced format might have on your application.

Cons: The WD20EARS model designation is insufficient to unambiguously specify what drive you will get. The p/n suffix and firmware revision are critical in some applications.
The HCL for a ReadyNAS specifies WD20EARS-00S8B1 with firmware 80.00A80. I ordered these and received WD20EARS-00MVWB0 definitely NOT presently on the HCL. I ended up returning the drives.
I am giving 4 eggs since I should have figured this out prior to purchase. Newegg has confirmed for me that they can not specify which suffix I would get if I exchanged. Still the missing egg is directed only at WD, since IMHO end users should shoudl get a form/fit/function equivalent drive regardless of suffix when buying a given model.

Other Thoughts: In some applications, the SMART parameter LCC will increase steadily, at a rate of several times per minute. The drive is rated for a very large, yet finite number of Load Cycle Counts before it wears out, on average. The drive automatically unloads the heads when not in use unless the host tells it not to. If your host accesses the disk once every few seconds (which is not uncommon in some uses) then this will cause excessive load cycling. Folks have calculated that the average MTBF LCC may be reached in as little as 1 year. There is a firmware parameter modification (or update) from WD which may apply to this drive to change this behavior. Note this is not specific to the ReadyNAS storage boxes.

Pros: To the previous reviewer, these drives DO work in the ReadyNAS. You need to use the newest (beta) firmware to get them to work in a Duo/NV+, however.

I'm running three in my NV+ and everything is great. The LCC issue is fixed by running the WDIDLE3 app provided by WD.

These are some of the quietest drives I've ever heard and they seem plenty fast, at least for my needs. All four of the drives I ordered came to me safe and sound and have yet to give me any problems.

For the price I paid (on sale for $110/ea), you just can't get a better 2TB drive. I'm very pleased, especially considering how awful of an experience I had with the Seagate 1.5TB drives I tried prior to this (ordered four and the first two I tried exhibited signs of dying and were already clicking).

Cons: Advanced format drives (4k sectors vs. traditional 512k sectors), could cause some issues with performance until systems adopt the new technology. This is the way of the future though, so expect more support to come soon.

Some people have complained about the load cycle count (LCC) IDLE3 issue with these drives and how the drives may be set up for early failure because of this. Whether the LCC will really result in an early failure remains to be seen, but the LCC issue can be resolved by running the WDIDLE3 application which WD provides. My LCC numbers for the three drives in my NAS: 6, 6, and 10 (running 33 hours). Running the WDIDLE3 app is almost mandatory for anyone wanting to run these drives in a non-Windows system. This could be an issue for people with no access to a PC (tower) as the application does not work with the drive plugged in via USB..

Other Thoughts: I went from 4x500gb (1.36TB available space in a RAID-X configuration on my ReadyNAS) to 3x2TB (3.6TB available space) with a spare drive. If I add it in, I'll be up to 5.4TB. And all for under $500? Fantastic. I'm very pleased.

Pros: Cool running quite large economical at this date for the capacity, also has the newest technology of 4k sector size. Big 64mb cache.

Cons: Got 2 one died after 20 hours use. These drives use the new 4k sector size and require vista or Windows 7 for native support. XP and othe older OS require a utility to be run in order to align the partition to avoid a speed slowdown. Not that big a problem you just need to be aware of it in dealing with older operating systems.

Other Thoughts: Test your drives well before trusting them for service and always backup your data! I tested my drives by partitioning, formatting, and the wiping the drives with acronis disk utility several times. Like I mentioned I had one of 2 die in 20 hours testing use. This being said I still may get more of these drives due to the economical price per GB.

Pros: Wow... I was expecting 50MB/s based on the other reviews that I saw. That's cool with me cause I am using it as a data drive and not my boot. What I got was a drive that writes at 120MB/s from my 1TB Black in the same system. I am certain too I timed a 650GB transfer (the 250GB transfer intrigued me).

Cons: It's not free, but $0.15 per GB close.

Other Thoughts: b e a utiful

Pros: Installed in unRAID as parity drive. All is well so far.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I needed to de-activate the advanced format to use with unRAID, but it works fine with no problems.

Pros: Great amount of storage per dollar. Not as slow as some people make them out to be. I wouldn't use one as a boot drive or to load applications, but for data storage and streaming HD video these drives are perfectly well suited. Western Digital drives seem fairly reliable to me (see other thoughts). Not sure if the 64MB cache version (EARS) is much better performing than the 32MB cache version (EADS), but it would stand to reason for large file transfers that this would be an improvement. Low power consumption in these drives is a big plus for me, since all the computers I have running (plus the air-conditioner to keep them from roasting me alive) are taxing my power supply to the limit.

Cons: None that I can see. The price is comparable to 2TB drives of other manufacturers.

Other Thoughts: I have purchased 11 Western Digital internal disk drives in the last six months, mostly 1TB caviar blacks and 2TB caviar greens, and a couple other odd models for specific purposes. All of these drives arrived in good condition (thanks for the peanuts, Newegg! It is TRULY appreciated!) and have been running healthy since. I currently have four 2TB caviar green models in an eSATA enclosure and use them for data backup and occasionally streaming video. Do yourself a favor, suck it up and pay extra for Fedex shipping. I've been compulsively ordering parts for computers since I started building gaming rigs, and since I stopped going with the UPS ground free shipping a few years back I have seen a significant reduction in DOAs. Take a good hard disk drive and give it one good drop on the floor and see how long it lasts for, anyway that's my two cents.

Pros: I really am happy I decided to purchase this drive. I have a 17" iMac G5 that I bought new in 2004, with a 80GB internal HD. I was using a FW400 external drive for an additional 250GB of storage. I was maxed out!

This new drive fit perfectly into my iMac. I partitioned it to have a small area to clone the original internal drive and the rest was open space for the external.

Worked like a charm. Now I've got something like 5 or 6 times the amount of storage space that I had before. Plenty of room to grow.

I find the drive to be very quiet, and for my use it's a huge speed increase over the old internal and external drives I had.

I'm not quite sure how much power I save over a comparable drive, but that wasn't the main reason for my purchase. I liked the price to storage ratio.

The package came no frills, just the drive in a box - but that's fine by me as I would have thrown the rest out anyway.

Cons: I can't think of any cons for this product.

Other Thoughts: If you've got an old Mac that you are looking to upgrade a bit, consider giving this drive a try. I'm happy I did.

Pros: This is the advanced format WD drives with 4k sectors instead of 512b sectors.

64mb cache, possibly a bit faster.

Cons: Not so much a "Con" as a "Beware". These drives have incompatibility issues with older hardware/OS's.

The user must really research what they are getting these drives for. If you're using windows 7 and plan on using this as a desktop drive, you should be good to go.

Users of Windows XP will have to read the information about sector realignment using a Western Digital tool or just jumper the drive - but this only works if the drive is *one* partition. Multiple partitions require the Western Digital alignment tool for format...

And if, like me, you wanted to use these drives in a RAID array in a NAS box.....don't. I was going to use these in a D-link NAS, but I did not do my homework as thoroughly as I should have. Initial reading at the D-link site suggested they would work, but further reading and interacting with other users reveals they won't work properly - at least not in a RAID array. Limited success has been achieved using these drives singly, though.

Other Thoughts: NewEgg, as always, is the best and understood my "predicament" and have assisted me in returning the drives so that I can get a couple of the Samsung F3EG's instead.

Pros: The new 4k clusters more than compensates for the lower RPM (5900). This drive performs faster at Sata 3 than the WD 1TB at Sata 6 I bought a few months ago.

Cons: You need Windows Vista or Windows 7 to take advantage of the performance boost.

Other Thoughts: strap in and hold on, this hard drive moves...

Pros: large drive for little cost

Cons: Western Digital. I've never had a problem with WD before, but the hard drive was faulty so I had to contact customer support over the issue. (The Diagnostics of the drive failed.) Due to out-sourcing several times I couldn't even get past giving the serial number. They hung up on me several times and the little help i did receive i had to struggle for. I will think long and hard before I buy WD again due to there terrible customer support.

Other Thoughts: WESTERN DIGITAL HAS THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE. If you get a drive that works, great. If you don't... bad news bears.

Pros: Quiet, large capacity. Much quieter than the previous drive it replaced.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I am using this as the second hard drive on a Windows XP system (data only). Have four partitions. Be sure to use the alignment tool after creating your partitions, and before you load your data.

Pros: Grade A if it works properly
Grade F for DOA or early failure

Large capacity, WDIDLE3 utility for DOS to adjust green turn off delay up to 300 seconds. Excellent data transfer rates come fairly close to Caviar Black.

Cons: 25% failure rate for me.
I am placing a lot of these drives for the advantages stated above.

WD Data Lifeguard diagnostics are finicky about platform. Runs fine on GA-EP45-UD3R, will not run on GA-G31M-ES2L at all.

Other Thoughts: These drives should not be used for System volumes at all. Windows pings the sysvol constantly, so this will never go to sleep. The factory setting of sleep at 8 seconds is much too quick. Use the WDIDLE3 utility to increase to 300 seconds.

After weeding out the DOAs, I get excellent results with a modest 80gb system drive, and a pair of WD20EARS in RAID1 as the data volume. ICH10R raid works flawlessly with these drives.

I wish WD would get their act together and correct the awful failure rate. IMO, there is no excuse for a dead controller. I can understand bad sectors at this density, but dead controllers are not acceptable.

Pros: Large capacity
Low heat

Cons: Poor support from WD
High failure rate

Other Thoughts: I would avoid this drive, I have had 2 out of 2 fail on me. I called WD and they stated they did not support their drive if you use it in an external USB case, only if it is inside a computer. That is crazy, I am sure a very large percentage of these drives are going to be used in external hard drive enclosures. I am no longer a WD hard drive customer after I was told that. 2 hard drive falures in less than 60 days plus no support from WD=unhappy customer

Pros: *crickets chirping*

Cons: I tried formatting it as NFTS, and it formatted as RAW. I tried formatting it again, and it disappeared from the OS' recognition. It would only be found when restarting the PC, only to disappear once more. NOTHING fixes this issue. Their diagnostics program passed the quick test, but failed the extended test miserably, citing that there are "too many bad sectors." I'm running Windows 7 64x premium.

Other Thoughts: This is my 2nd WD that's failed me unreasonably. I will not be buying from them again.

Pros: -Cost per Megabyte of storage is GREAT
-Megabyte of Storage to size is GREAT (i.e. 2 TB in a single 3.5" bay)

Cons: - Overall performance is in question
- Reliability is in question
I purchased two of these drives to upgrade my ReadyNAS Duo from 1TB RAIDed to 2TB RAIDed. I yanked the secondary 1TB out and put the first 2TB drive in and after about 20+ hours of reRAIDing, everything was good except the system reported a high number of ATA errors. I pulled the primary 1TB out and put the second 2TB in and it would not recognoze it. I tried everything including putting the 2TB in question in alone to recreate the RAID from scratch. The drive just won't work.

Other Thoughts: I've sent the questionable drive in for replacement. Once I get the replacement, I may be able to update this with final thoughts. Right now, I'm not sure I picked the right drive. :(

Pros: Gigantic
Performs
Inexpensive

Cons: Seems too good to be true?

Other Thoughts: Bought my first WD20EARS as a backup drive on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit system, which functions well as our home gaming machine, workstation, file server, media server, and seedbox. Since Windows 7 and Vista are already compatible with Western Digital's new 4k block size, I was able to just put it in the system and go with little configuration (although I did remove the software that came with it).

It worked so well, I decided to replace my 500GB WD5000AACS with it and see how it did. That went so well, I'm getting another one, and I doubt it'll be my last. By the time I stop buying these, I'll probably have a pretty meaty stand-alone file server.

Not certain how the perfect storm of size, performance and price merged on this model, but I have yet to find the flaw in this product.

Pros: Have to say I am surprised with this 5400RPM HDD. It is quite literally outperforming my two 7200RPM non-WD drives, as well as my one 7200RPM Western Digital drive.

While copying data to the drive from my old drives I monitored it using Windows Resource Monitor and noted sustained write speeds of >70MB/s! It was taking less than two minutes to copy an entire 8GB ISO from one drive to another.

HDTune results show that it has a higher transfer rate across the board as compared to my other three drives:

Minimum Transfer Rate: 46.8MB/s (vs 42.3MB/s, 9.5MB/s, and 23.1MB/s)
Maximum Transfer Rate: 127.2MB/s (vs 107.9MB/s, 107MB/s, and 82.6MB/s)
Average Transfer Rate: 88.7MB/s (vs 84.7MB/s, 79.3MB/s, and 63.6MB/s)

Cons: The HDTune results also show that the response time is a little slower on average, the burst transfer comes in second, and surprisingly the temperature is second to last:

Access Time: 16ms (vs 12.9ms, 12.5ms, and 13.3ms)
Burst Rate: 141.3MB/s (vs 98.9MB/s, 159.7MB/s, and 111.7MB/s)
Temperature: 41' C (vs 36' C, 39' C, and 42' C)

I suspect the temperature is due to the fact that it is physically between the 39' C and 42' C drives, which may have helped to prevent proper heat dissipation during my overnight transfer of ~900GB.

Other Thoughts: One of the non-WD drives (#1 comparison result) is running the OS which could have lowered the results, but even still the 5400RPM WD20EARS is quite competitive. The other non-WD drive (#2 comparison result) and the older WD (#3 comparison) are both data drives and were not in use during the tests. Likewise, the WD20EARS was not in use during the tests. If the WD20EARS can dump on my 7200RPM drives, I wonder what the WD1001FALS/WD2001FASS drives can do!

I received the drive a few days prior to writing this, and immediately started hammering it with benchmarks and stress tests to ensure I was not going to have any issues. All tests passed A-OK and so I am now using it for data storage.

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and the drive was formatted with a 64k Allocation Unit size. Per fsutil the "Bytes per Sector" is 512 and not 4096, but everything is working for now so I won't fuss with it.

Pros: Fastest Green Drive I have used. I use as boot drive for my iMac, faster boot time than the original SATA drive that came with the iMac. Runs very cool, I noticed about a 5 degree drop in overall temp according to SMC. A great drive at great Price!

Cons: Non At this Point.

Other Thoughts: I bought 2 of these, one for boot and one for Time Machine. Both dead silent and both run very cool. The one in my external drive ran 2 solid days transferring Data. It ran very cool and quite. WD makes great drives!

Pros: Works like a charm, another drive on my server, fast speed, low noise.

Cons: NA

Pros: I put four of these in a Synology Diskstation 410. Very quiet; running temperatures are reported to be from 40C down near the circuit board to 35C up at the top of the small, tight-fitting case -- well below their operating limit of 60C.

Cons: WD seems to be going to great lengths to omit any mention of actual rotation speed from any spec sheets, instead just saying "Rotational speed (RPM): IntelliPower." Tom's Hardware stated that the 32MB buffer version, WD20EADS, spun at 5400 RPM. I'm not sure that would be acceptable if it were a primary drive in a desktop, but in this NAS, its spindle speed is just fine (whatever it is).

Note to WD: don't play marketing games with techies. Just give us the numbers. And a whitepaper if you feel there's more going on that the number don't show.

Other Thoughts: Newegg continues to do a fine job packing OEM/bare drives; these were individually bubble-wrapped and boxed... and then shipped in a larger outer box with plenty of "peanuts."

Pros: Formatted without any errors. I did a full format so I could know if there were any bad sectors. This is my second 2TB Green drive. My first one was the old EADS model and this is the new EARS model. I'm running Win7, so no problems there with EARS. My old one I got almost a year ago. I'm using it to store all my HD movies. So speed isn't a major issue.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I also have a WD 1TB Black drive that is going bad after about 1.5 years. I'll have to do a warranty exchange. I have lost some data, but it wasn't that important.

Pros: I've bought about 10 of these over the last 6 months. I haven't had a single failure (knock on wood). Simply I love these drives, they run cool, waste less energy and have adequate speed. The extra capacity means less work for file management. I'm a video editor so I eat of gigabytes like nobody's business.

Cons: Speed I guess. But I edit HD video and these things can keep up. I get 85 MB/sec read speeds. I run into processing bottlenecks long before disk speed bottlenecks.

Pros: This drive is surprisingly fast IF YOU RUN Windows 7. Very quiet and extremely cool, that last part was important to me since I have 5 HDs in my system and run crossfire setup graphics-cards wise. I do not use this drive for gaming, but probably could. I will use 2 of these drives to back-up my 2 other Hitachi 2TB drives...

Cons: Packing left quite a bit to be desired -- no bubble, no foam, only a piece of crumbled paper...

Other Thoughts: Great value and low operating temperature make this drive a winner in my view.

Pros: quiet and fast.

Cons: none so far.

Other Thoughts: I did an acronis disk copy on this and my transfer speeds were low at about 30 mb/sec. found the Acronis alignment software at the wd site, ran that and it is now doing about 70 mb/sec. I am running windows 7 64bit.

Pros: I use this inside an ARGOSY HV-335T media player to play movies and so far it is excellent!! It is Quiet and the ARGOSY has a fan in it that keeps it nice and cool. I put my hand on and around the vents while doing many large file transfers and it never even felt warmer than room temp... I've never heard the drive over the players fan so that's always good for a media player. The 64MB Cache seems to keep everything smooth and fluid as a video player drive anyways.

Cons: Ha Ha don't know if you can call it a con but the drive weighs a ton:) You sure can feel the 2TB when you pick it up. So if you intend using it in a portable enclosure, remember the WEIGHT a big drive brings as well. I put it in my player and It weighs it down that's for sure. I guess it keeps the player from moving around with the stiff cables attached to it. Not blazing fast but it's a storage drive... Wouldn't use it for a boot or system drive if speed is a concern but storage at 2TB is where it shines.

Other Thoughts: Never a hiccup playing my media files or loading files across USB or my Network. It works and has a ton of storage space so it's great as a storage drive or media player drive. Being 5400 RPM likely keeps the noise level and power use down; Oh and the temps too. It's worth the performance hit to keep these cool, quiet, and reasonably priced; at least for my application. The 64MB cache should be great for keeping data flowing smooth. I've never seen a glitch in video playback due to a slow transfer speed or anything I can blame on the drive.

Pros: I picked up a pair of these drives, one was ordered from Newegg to put in a Synology NAS box. These drives run cool and have an incredible amount of storage. That's all that I need from them. Performance is a non issue for me and anyone considering this drive should take it's specs into careful consideration before purchasing.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: For data retention, this drive is amazing. It won't light the world on fire with it's performance numbers but that's not what it was designed to do. Get an SSD or Raptor if you are looking for raw throughput. If you are looking for a reliable spot to backup your data, and you need 1TB+, this drive should be on your list.

Pros: Cool, quiet as the night

Cons: Not the fastest.

Other Thoughts: I'm using it as a backup drive in an old USB enclosure. I know I'm not getting the full performance out of it, but a 470GB copy completed smoothly and this thing is incredibly quiet and gets much cooler than my old Seagate 7200.10.

Pros: 2 TBs on the relative cheap. Great for straight storage of data on a small home server.

Cons: Not a good idea for gaming. This is for straight up storage for a constant on box.

Other Thoughts: Got 4 of these for a home server I built running Ubuntu 9.10 64 Bit. All ran great out of the box. They are formatted with EXT4 into several partitions to optimize read and writes for OS operations and to maximise storage space across all 4 drives in a non-RAID set up. Some folks may think this is a poor way of setting up a server, but if done right it really cuts down on read and write time using all 4 drives to search/read/write data at the same time without redundancy of tasking per drive.

Pros: Purchased two of these for a RAID-1 configuration. I received my drives in the same shipping manor as @Lotus noted. Running on Windows 7 64-bit; work flawlessly.

Cons: None

Pros: Huge amount of space, I have two of them in a D-link network raid bay. 5 drives in one order, Packaged well and arrived fast as usual for the Egg.

Cons: None!

Other Thoughts: Don't buy a green drive and then complain that your system is slow, It's not meant for a System drive. Get a Black for that. Green is for S t o r a g e.
Research, then buy.

Pros: Large Storage, Inexpensive, Quiet, Low Power, Low Temp, High Throughput

Cons: Slower access times compared to some

Other Thoughts: Tested speed with HDTune,
Max 118MB/s
Min 50MB/s
Avg 88MB/s
Access Time 16ms
Burst Rate 185MB/s

512 bytes 62 IOPS Access 15ms .031MB/s
4kb 61 IOPS Access 16ms .242MB/s
64kb 58 IOPS Access 17ms 3.639MB/s
1MB 32 IOPS Access 30ms 32.883MB/s
Random 40 IOPS Access 24ms 20.705MB/s

Some people complained of lag, I think it may be there HDD controller. I plugged it into my GA-7NNXP mobo and yes there was lag; everything paused, started, paused.... It is in my new build now ( GA-880GMA-UD2H mobo) and there is none at all. I have not updated my GA-7NNXP sata drivers to see if that fixed it.

Pros: Good Deal. Shiny. Looks just like a working hard drive. Spins.

Cons: BIOS reports an error and that's all she wrote. DOA.

Other Thoughts: I'm getting hungry.

Pros: Big, cheap.

Cons: 50% DOA rate.

Other Thoughts: At this rate, 1 of the 2 replacement drives will also be DOA (I kid). I don't like owning things I have to perpetually fret over.

These are in a Drobo.

Pros: Inexpensive, relatively low power usage, vast storage capacity, fairly quick access time and transfer speed. They work perfectly with Linux LVM2 if either first partition starts at sector 64 (vs default of 63) or if used as a raw LVM disk with --dataalignment 4096 and physical extent size is a multiple of 4096.

Cons: Bare drive, no screws, cables, or documentation. Given all the hubub about performance problems with this drive, it would be sensible to include a slip of paper warning about partitioning the drive correctly. Also, poor shipping packaging (Each drive was packaged in 2 layers of bubble wrap inside a small white box, then the pair of those were loosely packed into a very large box with a lot of paper wadding on one side only, leaving the inner boxes audibly rattling around inside the outer box.) The outer box arrived fairly well smashed, but the inner boxes were OK. The drives looked and sounded OK, and passed all diagnostics and performance tests I could throw at them three times /w no errs before I put them in production.

Other Thoughts: I'm happy with the purchase. I haven't bought WD drives in a while due to past problems, but if these last I will likely purchase WD products again.

Pros: Good speed, large capacity, easy to install, low power consumption. Quick Newegg service.

Cons: Could be faster, cheaper

Other Thoughts: It's not as fast as my 1 year old WD caviar black 1tb drive (thought tech advancement would have narrowed the gap). I haven't noticed a difference with the new WD format. Adequate packaging by Newegg.

Pros: Big. Inexpensive. Runs cooler than most 2 TB drives.

Cons: Out of the box, initial format revealed about 900 GB of bad sectors. Amazingly, Western Digital Data Lifeguard program, in "extended" mode, gave the drive a PASS! So I deleted the partition, made a new one, formatted it again, and there were once again about 900 GB of bad sectors. I give up and back it goes.

Other Thoughts: The results from the "extended" version of the Western Digital Data Lifeguard program cannot be believed.

Pros: Huge capacity. Great price. Great performance. 3-platter design. 64MB cache.

Cons: None at all.

Other Thoughts: Don't believe the people that are saying these green drives are slow or that they aren't fast enough to be a system drive. That's bull. I'm using mine as a storage drive but it actually slightly beats out my 1TB Caviar Black (WD1001FALS) in most all tests aside from latency. I attribute that to the fact that its a 3-platter design and has more cache than the Caviar Black. But its still a little strange. Oh well, I'm fine with it being faster than my Caviar Black :). The extra RPMs and lower latency on the Black still make it the better system drive.

This drive is amazing. Great price (got it for $99 shipped on a shell shocker), great performance, and great capacity. Super glad I bought it. Newegg shipped fast as always and it was very well packaged.

Pros: Well, it provides as much storage space roughly equivalent to the size of Montana.

Cons: As expected it has a spool up time, if it's "asleep" or whatever and you try to open it, it'll freeze for maybe 3-4 seconds before it gets up to speed then you can browse normally. Transfer speeds were faster than expected.

Not sure if this was just my drive, but after about 3 months, suddenly it's freezing quite a bit more than what I would consider "normal" and sometimes it crashes completely and it disappears until a reboot. Getting a little concerned for the data on it.

Pros: None

Cons: Started failing immediately. Day later, won't even format. Have the older verions the WD20EAD model also, and that one has been flawless.

Other Thoughts: After hundreds of purchases over many years at NewEgg, this is my first DOA

Pros: Very fast transfers, cool, as fast or faster than all of my 1 TB's and smaller including Seaga___ ,WD,Samsu___,that I have installed per WDtune in spite of the 5900rpm. Coolest running also. I was surprised with the transfers and temp.. also faster than 2TB Seagxxx 7200 rpm in transfers write/read.

Cons: Long set up with the Advanced format and the Intellipark timer adjustment. I had no problem resetting that with WDidle3 through DOS, it ws just an extra step that is an inconvenience. (I set it to 300 sec(5 min), the max) After that the park count pretty much stopped per WDtune.

Other Thoughts: Why did some reviewer write that the head park time could not be adjusted? That is outright wrong, they could have just read these reviews or googled it. That's not helping anyone, posting incorrect info. It's a person who rated themself " high tech. understanding" like so many ..........

Pros: WD RMA service is (so far anyway) pretty pain free.

Cons: Really, really unreliable, which is a shame considering a likely use for these drives will be for mass storage backup.

Other Thoughts: This is my first review from any of the plethora of products I've bought from newegg. I got hosed so badly though, that I feel it's important to get the word out to potential buyers of these drives.

I bought 4 of these for a RAID 5 configuration in my home NAS. I was careful, installed everything by the books, and made sure to install a fan for proper ventilation of the HD bay. The disks seldom got above 31°C. Within a week, 3 out of the 4 had irreparable bad sectors. With a RAID 5 configuration, I thought I was being pretty careful in regard to combatting data loss from a drive failure. If 1/4 failed, I would be fine. But after the first failed, 2 more failed the next day while rebuilding. Kind of ridiculous.

Needless to say, I'm going to be terrified about the integrity of my data on any of these drives in the future, even assuming the replacements work for longer than a week. If 75% of my drives failed within 7 days, the odds of anything making it to 3 years+ have to be slim.

Pros: none

Cons: bought in june and seemed to work fine until recently (mid august).. started by having issues with files on the drive not running properly, but would correct after a chkdsk /f.. but after about a week or so of that it completely died and comes up as a failed drive.. Tried hooking it up through esata and still nothing..

Pros: Worked for a few days

Cons: 1.8 T when installed & formatted, Died after a few days.

Other Thoughts: If you are going to buy this drive make sure to run something heavy across all sectors, like encrypting the whole thing. The drive stopped responding after 3 days, @ 90% encrypted. I'm going to order another one, but if it dies then I'll update.

Pros: Large capacity, amazing cost, low power.

Cons: This is a follow-up review.

Over the last year and a half, I have purchased and installed 10 of these 2GB EARS, 5 of the older model 2GB EADS, and 6 of the 1.5GB EADS drives. This is spread over four systems for myself and friends. Out of the 21 drives, I have had 11 failures. Indeed, two of the drives that I have RMA'd with Western Digital have themselves failed.

I have been an enormous Western Digital fan over the last ten years and have purchased hundreds of their drives in the course of work and personal use. The failure rate of their large capacity green drives is simply unbelievable. I'd attempted to give these drives a fair chance, but at this point, I'd have to agree with many others:

Stay away from all large-capacity WD green drives at all costs. I'll never trust my data to these again and will begin the transition, as money allows, to another vendor.

Other Thoughts: Some reviews here discuss the 8 second idle timeout that parks the heads. While this promotes power savings, this is added wear and tear on the drive.

Western Digital has released a utility to change or disable this IDLE3 timer. It is called WDIDLE3, available from their website:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en

Pros: Large, Cheap.

Cons: Ordered 5 for a RAID 5 array, one of them was bad, it spins up, is recognized ok, but any reads / writes just fail so they whole array would hang.

Other Thoughts: Years of ordering from newegg and this was my first RMA, it was as painless as everyone says. Good bang for buck, and based on other reviews 4 out 5 working for a hard drive these days is good. I'm getting 130ish mb / sec with a sansdigital TR5UTB raid tower.

Pros: Lower power draw and .. um.. price for capacity?

Cons: One drive of first pair was defective, had massive errors copying to the drive. While needing to wait to RMA it I bought another one. In subsequent testing of the pair of drives I decided to return all of them since the performance in RAID-1 sucked SO badly.

Fiddling with aligning partitions to 4k sector boundaries done, wdidle3 used as well to stop the drives from powering off after 8 seconds. I thought I had coddled them enough and then I started using them.

Using hdparm (Linux) individual drives were measuring out at about 80MB/sec. I have a pair of Seagate 1TB 7200.12 drives in RAID-1 also and individually they measure at about 100MB/sec, so not too bad so far considering the WD's 'greenness'. Well, in RAID-1 (Linux md RAID) the performance was AWFUL. The RAID-1 of the Seagate's was measuring at 95MB/sec - 115MB/sec. The WD green drives were doing 28MB/sec - 85MB/sec, often hovering around the 50MB/sec mark. Measurements were taken many different times for averages

Other Thoughts: I had hoped to be able to use 2 of these drives in RAID-1 for a simple server and keep noise and heat to a minimum. Lower power draw, good I thought. Wow, that was a waste of time.

Accessing files (large digital picture files) from the server was the most startling indication of a problem. The images were loading like they were coming over a poor wireless connection instead of gigabit ethernet. Accessing the same data on the other RAID pair (Seagates) alternately for testing (neither PC was rebooted between tests) was as quick as ever, nearly instant loading.

Replacing these green drives with a pair of WD Caviar Black 2TB drives. I've learned my lesson with green drives, don't do RAID with them.

Pros: None, really.

Cons: I would highly recommend avoiding these drives at all cost. I was using 4 of them in a Drobo attached to my HTPC. Within a week, 2 of the 4 drives have failed and my confidence in the remaining two are low enough that I'm contemplating a refund and going with a different drive.

Pros: Huge storage
Power efficient
Maximum transfer speed I've had so far is 50MB/sec

Cons: Actual storage space is 1.81TB
Slow as all hell
Doesn't handle multiple tasks well...or at all (read and write)
Transfer speed fluctuates alot!

Don't expect performance from it.

Other Thoughts: About 3 months ago I purchased and have been using the 1.5 TB version of this drive and I've been happy with the purchase since. Saw the 2TB on sale recently and jumped at the special. The two drives are like night and day. The 2 TB model performs horribly. I've been using it as a Video media storage drive, and tried to watch something from it while copying other files to it. It stuttered like crazy with the video playback, the transfer speed drop to 18Mb/sec. Just seems crazy.


The 1.5 TB gave, and continues not to give any of these problems.

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Was DOA

Other Thoughts: I checked with warranty support. If you send back to WD, they'll cross ship you a new one before the old arrives, and you keep the 3 year warranty from original date of purchase.

Pros: High GB/$

Cons: Didn't work.

1st drive formatted then starting stuttering on my system and reporting errors. RMA

2nd drive wouldn't even format after several tires. RMA and am going to get a different drive.

Other Thoughts: My Velociraptor and WD Black still work great.

Kudos to Newegg for a Smooth RMA process and taking care of me on replacements.

My Seagate 7200.11 had issues and died (not to mention getting jerked around by their tech support) so I decided to only buy WD and have been totally happy until now. Looking at the reviews there seem to be A LOT of failures with this drive. It suprises me that WD still sells it. Getting two bad drives in a row would indicate major issues.

Pros: Price, storage capacity

Cons: Durability when used in RAID

Other Thoughts: Take the recommendation of not to use these in RAID SERIOUSLY! I've used these drives in RAID1 and RAID5 - both hardware and software - and have had the RAIDs last no longer than 3 months without a disk failure. With the amount they hold and the time to rebuild, this is no longer economical. They may indeed work fine as standalone drives, but not in RAID.

Pros: Massive size

Cons: Ive been doing this computer thing for a long time and ive had my fair share of bad hard drives from other manufacturers. Its a very rare occurance that it happens with Western Digital. Ive been buying these drivers for some time now and almost all have been good. With the exception of say 2-3 drives that were bad due to rough shipping handling. Not to enthused about what happened with this drive.

I installed the drive, windows vista 64 picked up on it and alerted me that it was ready for install. I initalized the drive then formatted it and away I went.

I started transferring files from one of my other wd drives, started at about 100MB/s then gradually tapered to about 10MB/s. I check the cluster size of the drive to make sure that it is 4K compatible and it was. So no slow transfer issue should loom because of a mis-formatted drive. I proceeded to test the drive with wd diagnostics and it came back with status code 07 (read element failed) basically the heads are failing to re

Other Thoughts: RMA'd the drive to WD and now im waiting to see how the new one performs. Hard to rate a drive when a person has never been able to test it. I will buy again, but maybe these drives should be put through a more rigorous test before they enter the market

Pros: Shipped fast, price was good, space would have been nice.

Cons: This drive is nothing but a pain for use with Linux. The 'advanced format drive' was implemented poorly by WD, and not well supported by linux. I probably won't return the drive, but it will get placed as a secondary drive on a Windows 7 computer.

Other Thoughts: It is my fault for seeing "2TB Shell Shocker" and ordering it without researching it. But here is your warning... Does not work well with anything but Windows 7 (windows server 2008 is probably ok too)

Pros: Following all the procedures for formatting for Linux, these drives worked fine. No performance complaints.

Cons: 1 out of 4 drives I bought failed in under 1 month. Concerned about the other 3...

Other Thoughts: I have 3 drives set up in a RAID5 (Linux SW based) and they are so far working fine. Noticed that the 4th drive (which is on its own) was not showing up at its mount point under LINUX. Rebooted and the BIOS reported the SMART status as BAD for this drive. Did not diagnose further, but I'm going to be watching the other 3 like a hawk. NewEgg RMA was an online and immediate approval process, so the drive goes back tomorrow.

Pros: - large capacity
- low price
- large cache
- low power consumption
- low heat

Cons: - Low performance
- Advanced Format makes it incompatible with some popular uses

Other Thoughts: To make a long story short, I had purchased 2 of these drives to use them in my NAS, which could not properly format them. I did some research prior and thought that since my NAS is running Linux, I should be able to get them to work. A month later, I was forced to throw in the towel. I called WD support and asked to downgrade to WD20EADS which are not Advanced Format. They bungled it at first, but eventually (2 months in total) the problem was resolved to my satisfaction. I'll be describing the saga on my blog.

PURCHASE THIS DRIVE ONLY IF YOU PLAN ON USING IT IN YOUR OWN PC. IF YOU PLAN TO USE IT IN A SPECIALIZED DEVICE, MAKE SURE IT'S SUPPORTED - OTHERWISE, IT WILL BE virtually UNUSABLE!!!

Pros: big & fast

Cons: Needs new firmware. See below ("Other thoughts"). You might want to wait until WD implements firmware correctly. WD should offer user-installable firmware upgrades.

Other Thoughts: - Drive reports itself as having both logical and physical block sizes of 512 in Linux. So you have to be careful not only to align the partitions, but anything mapped on top, such as LVM, encrypted partitions, and RAID (although most default settings should work). Their firmware should at least reflect the physical block size, and ideally have both (logical and physical) be settable by the customer.
- The Data Lifeguard Diagnostic software from Western Digital does not recognize the drives. WD support indicated that newer drive firmware should work. They offered to exchange them for updated recertified/refurbished units (yes, possibly defective drives returned by a previous customer that had passed the original WD QA). I declined. The drives do pass "smartctl -t long" tests.
- Although I ordered two drives this week, both were manufactured seven weeks ago. I'm surprised Newegg's inventory is that old.
- Both drives were the 3-platter ones (WD20EARS-00MVWB0).

Pros: Lots of space.. Formated and installed with no problems

Its a Western Digital Drive

Good company

Cons: Getting corrupted files left and right.. Bad sectors reported from CHKDSK drive transfer rates have been killed

under 200 kb/s

Other Thoughts: Worked for about 3-4 months with no problems then started getting corrupted files

Luckily Western Digital has a 3 year warranty getting a new one shipped today.

Pros: Price + Excellent Western Digital Support. Should you have a problem Western Digital will take care of you.

Great storage drive for all your movies and television shows. 7200 RPM's not necessary for a drive like this.

Cons: Some will gripe about the RPM's or perhaps slightly slower transfer rates, but this drives does its intended purpose well. If you want more performance, get the Caviar Black drive.

Other Thoughts: Have only ever purchased Western Digital Drives new (had a used Maxtor once) and they have served me incredibly well. Did have a problem with one of the bunch, but Western Digital's RMA service is EXCELLENT.

Pros: Price. Size. Green.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: Know what you are getting. This is not a performance drive.

I put two of these in my WHS. After adding to the pool I rebooted with the bootable Acronis WD align CD and realigned the drives in about 1 minute. Very easy. No need for jumpers which don't come with the drive. The jumper method is a "hack" anyway, at least that's what the internet tells me (do your research). It's better to realign.

You can realign a drive with data on it, but it may take a long time, and you'll want to back up first. Again, this is what the internet tells me.

Pros: I bought a WD20EARS a couple months ago and it was a 4 platter design. I've been using it for a while without problems. Read my "Other Thoughts" for information on a new 3 platter design.

Cons: None, really.

Other Thoughts: The newest WD20EARS, the drives Newegg should be shipping by now, are a 3 platter design. They did not update the model number but drives made in June 2010 and later should be 3 platters. A 3 platter design should be faster, as well a little lighter and cooler. A little perk for recent purchasers.

Pros: Works great on my HTPC.
Western Digital has the perfect software to upgrade your C drive.
It makes a perfect clone.
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

Cons: None so far.

Pros: Very large and inexpensive storage. Lower power draw. Not terribly noisy. Great for using in an external storage enclosure to, well you know, store stuff (pictures, movies, music, game install files from D2D or other services like that).

Cons: It's a lower-RPM drive, so I personally wouldn't recommend it for OS or important programs. But if you're building systems from scratch or replacing components yourself, you should (or research enough to) know that already.

Good building to all!

Pros: Large Capacity
Low Power
Priced cheaper than WD20EADS

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: For folks wanting to use this in a WHS setup, I wanted to report that I have been using this drive in my WHS pool for a week now.

As another reviewer mentioned, this is an advanced format drive & needs to be realigned via the software tool or have the 7-8 jumpers shorted.

I've chosen to short the jumpers with 2.5mm jumpers purchased from an auction site (since I don't have an external dock). It works without issues with my WHS setup. Takes all of 5 seconds to setup and add to pool.

Pros: It worked for the first week.

Cons: After the first week, the drive failed. Lost all data. Now the drive only recognizes 1TB instead of 2TB. I have tried multiple computers and used WD diagnostics to no avail. Since it will not show 2TB (in bios) as advertised, its going back.

Pros: Great price for the amount of storage and the new tech contained therein.

Cons: Due to the advanced formatting that this drive uses, it is incompatible with network storage devices. There is no literature available about this issue in the specs - you pretty much have to stumble across a forum to find this out.

I specifically bought mine to use with the D-Link DNS-323 and had no idea it was incompatible until I accidentally stumbled across the forums. It was working in the device but would have eventually failed. I had to order two new drives and am out the cash spent on this model.

Other Thoughts: If you are using one of these drives with anything other than Windows Vista/7 and wondering why it's not performing well, it's because it is incompatible with other OS's/devices (though it can be made to work with XP via jumper settings/realignment software).

Western Digital needs to work with manufacturers to help them resolve the incompatibility, according to the sticky on the D-Link forums WD have been less than helpful.

Pros: It's a 2TB drive which I picked up on sale for $120.

Cons: I purchased two, one of which arrived DOA. Newegg is of course quick and easy to deal with, but as I wanted these for a home storage project and had to pay return shipping, I was a bit annoyed.

Other Thoughts: I have the working one in a Synology NAS enclosure that had no trouble recognizing it. I have not formatted or attempted writes to it yet, but it is at least visible.

Pros: It works and it is pretty quiet.Tested on USB and eSATA both works great
on a RAID unit also bought from newegg.

Cons: As matter of fact - 4 out of 5 worked nicely and I got one bad disk out of box - exactly 80% - 20% ratio. It makes click-click-click noise at the first plug in. I can not complain the packing from newegg since it looked pretty good. Did not know how it managed to bypass WD's QA. Had to get RMA from newegg and the online service and online chatting from newegg was amazingly quick and efficient.

Other Thoughts: I bought 5 of the same disk for a RAID 5 unit. One bad disk really caused delay since I had to wait for the RMA and shipping from east coast to CA round trip will easily cost more than two weeks. I hate to let my RAID off line for that long but got no choice at the moment. I wish newegg would start some program to allow the RAID builder get a guarantee or disk testing before shipping. I don't mind getting an open bag disk but I wish it was tested working. Like the one I have sent back - looks like it has problem with head touching the disc or magnet mechanism problems that a simple test at newegg could save me that two weeks time and actually I am willing to pay a little extra to have that "QA" done before shipping. On the other hand, the newegg online chat agent helped me to order another one which will arrive in 3 days - that is so far the best option for my new RAID I guess - still waiting though.

Pros: The drive is quiet and works as expected.

Cons: Probably the worst packing job I have ever seen! The drive was in a box with a piece of packing paper which was placed in a larger box with a few more pieces of packing paper. I thought for sure it would be DOA because of the amount of bouncing around I am sure it did while being delivered but thankfully it was alright. I love Newegg but the way this drive was shipped very disappointing.

Other Thoughts: Took 1 egg off because of the packing job, not the drives fault at all.

Pros: Bought 2 of these for my Synology DS209J NAS server at home. Plenty of storage capacity, Quiet, and they have always played nice with the NAS box. Currently in RAID 1 and working great.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Price fluctuates a LOT.. Gotta keep a close eye on these to get the best deal.

Pros: Just Got it yesterday. Ran WD WinDLG for any errors, all passed.

--> Transferring over 850GB data to this drive for last 2 hours; Speed fan reporting temp 50C and its quiet too.
--> Write speed around 47MB/s during this transfer; since its 5400rpm can't complain.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: I am using it in my file server to share media. Quiet and cool drive; perfect for my purpose.

Pros: Great Power to Capacity. Excellent reported MTBF (of course only time will tell).

Extremely quiet.

Cons: None (considering it is a large capacity low power drive)

Other Thoughts: The Performance is in line with its power usage, as expected.

Pros: Lots of space obviously, Quiet, Fast read/write for a "green" drive. In fact I'm getting read/write speeds of over 100mb/s according to HD tune. Much better than my old 7200 rpm storage drive which is was at around 40mb/s.

Cons: GB/c could be better but then again you are paying for the convenience of a 2GB drive and not a 1.5 or 1.0

Other Thoughts: Drive was recognized and formatted in win7 without a hitch. 1.8 TB usable space.

Pros: Just wanted to post about the new shipping procedure. I see a lot of people complaining that the drives arrive damaged due to Newegg putting a layer of paper at the bottom of the box and one layer of buble wrap around the hard drive then throwing in the box.

I purchased 4 of these EARS drives and received them yesterday. They came Shipped in a large Newegg box then inside there was 4 individual white strong boxes. Then inside each White box was the Hard drive wrapped in bubble wrap. There is no room for the drive to move around inside this Whte box. As long as Newegg keeps this practice up for all hard drive shipments we will all have less DOA drives. BTW: Selected free UPS 3 day shipping.... 139.99 each......Best deal so far without rebate...Dont forget 2% Bing cash...

Cons: None so far...Too new

Other Thoughts: All 4 drives loaded into my DroboPRO no problem. These drives use the new 4K sectors so you have to use the latest firmware BEFORE inserting into the DroboPro.

Pros: Large space, low power consumption. Huge 64mb cache. If your running Vista or 7, this drive is the perfect storage medium.

Cons: Doesn't work out of the box with windows xp.

Other Thoughts: Im running windows 7 and this drive works great. Transfer speeds aren't as fast 40mb/sec sometimes, but for a storage drive it's perfect. Haven't had a single problem yet.

Pros: Quiet, large size, Windows 7 spent 15 seconds to install it.

Cons: Slow. From my point of view, it's "reasonably slow". I don't see this as an affliction.

Other Thoughts: Good to have back-ups of home photos and movies on it.

Pros: - 2TB is pretty big (for now ;) )
- Relatively fast
- 64MB of Cache

Cons: It's a green drive so you're giving up some performance but one of the cons is certainly not the "Advanced Format" feature. Read Other Thoughts.

Other Thoughts: There seems to be a lot of confusion and misunderstandings about the "Advanced Format" feature. In short, the feature always you to have have more formatted space. So you can get a little closer to the actual 2TB size. It's true that this feature is only supported natively in Vista and 7 and in XP if you install software. HOWEVER, if you want to use this drive in a Linux machine or any OS that doesn't support Advanced Format, all you have to do is set a jumper before formatting. The jumper basically puts it in a legacy mode in regards to sector size. You really shouldn't lose any performance by doing that, only a little bit of formatted space. So no one should have to RMA this drive because it's not seen properly. Just set the jumper and format.

Pros: Good price, nice capacity, WD has good RMA process.

Cons: Dead on Arrival. SMART Disk Error on first day of using. Extemely slow transfer rates (related to the SMART error reported).

Other Thoughts: Kind of hard to judge the device itself since it was nonfunctional from the beginning. If nothing else suggests a potential quality issue. I RMAed through WD instead of newegg since they offer the "Advance Replacement" RMA where they send the new device in advance and you have 30 days to return the old one.

Pros: Overall for the price the drive is great, the drive is quiet good for overall storage and backup and quite cheap. Use as a secondary Storage device works especially good with raid.

Cons: Highly Recommend not using this as a Primary Drive for loading OS and programs or gaming. It is extremely slow and will only anger you trust me I bought this without researching the drive but that was my mistake, I used it for unintended purposes.

Other Thoughts: Hope this review helps others, don't make the same mistake I did. :)

Pros: 33% success rate.

Cons: 3 drives ordered, 2 failed within a week.

Other Thoughts: Usually I don't have a problem with WD; but there's something wrong with this particular model.

Pros: This problem is unique to a specific application. As far as I know the drive works fine in most general purpose computers.

Cons: The Western Digital drives with the "EARS" part number do not work as an outboard eSATA drive with the DirecTV HD DVRs (Type HR20, HR23, etc.) I had a terrible experience with the 1TB version of this drive (detailed there) and have since confirmed in the DBS Talk forum that my experience was consistent with everyone who has tried to use an EARS drive in this application.

The folks on the forum say it's a specific bug having to do with the "unique geometry" of the EARS series. (I haven't pursued the explanation beyond that)

My 1TB EARS is working just fine as an inboard drive on my Mac Pro.

Pros: Cheap price. Newegg Customer Support.

Cons: 5 drives out of 8 failed within 24hours. 3 will not format/initialize and one of which prevents Windows 7 from even booting up. The 2 others that failed suffered heavy read errors and large reallocated sector counts.

Other Thoughts: 4 look as if they were damaged BEFORE SHIPPING and yet were still sent to me. One was hit by something so hard it looked like a BB gun had done it. (The box and bubble-wrap/Styrofoam cocoon were completely intact.)

Pros: fast drives for there size. 3 of them have ran for over 6 months 24/7 in an Linux based dvr with out a problem

Cons: One drive out of 3 starting to have bad sectors

Other Thoughts: I have 3 of these drives running and recording 24 hours a day 7 days a week with out a problem in a Linux based security camera dvr, Till now one of the drives showing bad sectors. So now I need another to replace it wile the bad dive is fixed.

Pros: Good price, generally good reviews, have not installed yet, but...

Cons: ...this is single *worst* offender for Bad Backaging I've ever seen for a tech item. I am very disappointed NewEgg would ship hard drives with a tiny sheet of pre-popped bubble wrap. C'mon guys, at least put some in that has a little bit of air left in them. It can't cost THAT much more.

Other Thoughts: Okay, they were sold as "bare drives", but to be any more "bare" they'd have shipped with a handful of stamps stuck to the bare metal case.

If this is any indication of future purchases from NewEgg I'll need to start going to [insert brick-and-mortar here] for my tech hardware. I'm not joking guys.

If these things work 30 days I'll be very pleasantly surprised.

Pros: Specs

Cons: Unacceptably high failure rate.

Other Thoughts: I bought two for a customer's machine. Circumstances delayed the installation, and I am outside the newegg 30 day limit.

This means I do the Western Digital RMA, get a refurbished drive with a 90 day warranty.

I spend a *LOT* of repeat money on these drives, and am not happy.