Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: Large amount of space, decent transfer/read/write speeds if you're not expecting performance on par with an SSD or the Raptors. Long warranty (I'd say a 75% chance you're gonna need it! No joke!)...

Cons: First I want to say that I've been using PC's since I was 5 yrs old and have been building and troubleshooting them for over 20 years now (I'm 34). I work part-time in a computer shop (mainly on laptops) and have my own home network of 5 PC's and 2 Macs. I say this because some might get the idea that I'm saying what I'm going to out of ignorance or lack of experience. This is simply not the case. I've had various WD drives over the years and they have performed ok, but over the last year, I lost this particular model literally over night. It had plenty of airflow in the case, the PSU was more than enough to handle it (Antec Earthwatts 650wt) and it was setup correctly. Nonetheless, the drive died overnight. I came in the next morning and it was gone, apparently for good. I bought a replacement since I didn't have time to RMA, the same kind only a Caviar Black 2tb model and now a year later, it too is starting to fail.

Other Thoughts: The system the current failing drive is in is a Core i5/750, 6gb DDR3 Kingston RAM, Gigabyte P55M-UD2, ATI Radeon HD5770/1gb, Creative X-fi, Intel X-25 40gb SSD in a Thermaltake LanboxLite running Win7SP1/x32, along with previous mentioned Antec Earthwatts 650wt PSU. Clearly plenty to handle any hard drive. I've had other drives installed along with the WD, like a Seagate 7200.11 200gb and a Maxtor 500gb w/ no problems with them. As has been stated many times before, the failure rate of these drives in absurd! I'm in the process of RMA's both drives now (I just bought the 2nd drive after the first died instead of RMA'ing because I was way too busy to deal with it. And with a 3 yr warranty, it doesn't matter as long as it's within' that time frame.

All I can say is buyer beware and YMMV, and I hope some realize that just because YOURS works fine doesn't mean there isn't anything wrong with ALL of them...

Pros: decent, when working

Cons: 1 of 4 DOA.

Other Thoughts: How can a company pretend to have quality control with such high failure rates?

Pros: Cheap, 2TB of storage!

Cons: None

Pros: 2TB Storage
Silent

Cons: Tends to go bad upon 1 year.

Other Thoughts: This hard drive worked like a charm, but a few months later started acting up and not being noticed in the bios. Now I get SMART error message upon boot-up. After running diagnostics I have concluded that the drive has gone bad and need to place it.

Pros: Large capacity, inexpensive (I got them at a special price).

Cons: 1 failed after a year. Not acceptable!

Other Thoughts: Trust the reviews you see on this site. I went for the low price and it is costing me. I had hoped that hard drives would be cheaper by now, but they aren't.

Pros: -Was OK while it lasted

Cons: -Had a "pending sector" count of 1 in SMART info for quite a few months. Completely died after a total of 2 years. I expected it to last a lot longer.
-Has a design flaw where it parks the head every 5 seconds or something and quickly reaches the maximum rated number of lifetime load cycles within a few months. Google "wdidle" if you want to find out how to address this flaw. I didn't figure this out until about 6 months after I got the drive and I racked up a high load cycle count.

Other Thoughts: I used it as my primary hard disk for about 1 year and then for backup purposes (i.e. not used very much) for another year. It should have lasted like 5x as long. I probably only ever wrote about 10 TB throughout the lifetime of the disk.

Pros: 75% of them are still up and running, and I haven't hadn't operational issues until they begin to fail at least.

Cons: I've owned 12+ of these. 3 I have been replaced (RMA). Obviously 25% is a huge percentage for HDD failures, pretty unacceptable really.

Granted, I run these nearly 24/7 in a small server, but I've never had such high percentages of failures. They work for a 6-18 months than die, unfortunately.

Other Thoughts: I don't have a huge problem replacing these whenever they fail. I'll live, I have my data in a RAIDZ array and use other means for the most important data - so it's not the end of the world when they fail and I need to rebuild. It's more just a pain. Anyhow, I wish I had about 20 hours of my life back from dealing with these.

I won't skimp on HDDs next time!

Pros: Save energy
its run very cool

Cons: not at all

Pros: Western Digital, a trusted brand
Low Power Consumption
Quiet
Cool

Cons: Stopped Powering up after 10 months' use.
Variable seek speed made music storage a nightmare. Media player applications constantly hung up seeking and trying to play music from this drive because it kept going into sleep mode, or slowing it's speed so that there were long pauses and hang-ups.

Other Thoughts: I'm an internet DJ and used this for music storage. Every media application hangs up trying to load and play music because of the variable speed and sleep system.

I've used all those software applications with music stored on Blue versions of Western Digital drives, and not had this problem.

Finally, yesterday in very mid-use of recording audio to the drive, the drive quit working. I've tested it with known good alternate power, and alternate SATA connectors and the drive refuses to power up.

I own almost 2TB full of music and had no other drive big enough to back my music files up. I took a chance trusting the iron-solid Western Digital name, and now I've lost my entire collection of music. Some of them are rare one-time only free downloads directly from artists. Good job Western Digital. I won't ever use their green drives again, Blue and Black only from now on.

Pros: Cheap I suppose

Cons: This drive was included in a Computer purchase I made in January. As anticipated, the hard drive is showing failure potential problems. It's a widely complained about issue that is now causing me to have to be w/o a work computer for weeks to get it fixed by said computer company.

It is also CONSTANTLY going to sleep (which I realize is the whole point of the green thing) but WOW even when I'm functioning on the computer, it goes to sleep, and I will move something on the desktop and have to wait 30 seconds while it wakes up so my screen will unlock. It's not worth the power save and I'm hoping I can convince them to NOT replace it with the same thing.