Pros: Drive has tested out perfect with HDTune, HD Sentinel, Lifeguard, etc. Was put into place as part of a Raid 1 mirror.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: I have paid similar on the auction site back when I was considering used drives. For a few dollars, to get brand new, in my opinion is well worth it!

Pros: My older review is the one signed Richard E to the top right. I just used up my last one of these, and I will be soon buying another just as a spare. As I learn more about disk drives, and testing software, like spinrite, and hdsentinel, i am also learning more about SMART values. You can get SMART info from speedfan, in hex, or from HDTune in decimal - which I prefer. I noticed a C7 value, CRC errors, which I read about in wikipedia in the SMART article - and those are cable errors. I just did a bunch of spinrite testing, and my CRC values were increasing on my test computer secondary ide channel - and I thought it was a good 80 pin flat cable. I put on my last round cable - the one I am reviewing - and the problems disappeared.

Cons: Yes, the collars can be somewhat heavy, and you might want to cut them off. Lately I am not doing that, and they seem fine. One drive that kept disconnecting - I would boot up and it wasn't there - and I had blamed it on the heavy collar- that seemed to be a problem with that particular disk - the problem continued even with a change back to the flat ribbon, and finally I put a different disk in its place and no more disconnecting.

Other Thoughts: I only just recently learned about C7 CRC errors. You won't even see this in the HDTune health tab, unless you have one of the older WD ide drives - I own 15 ide 3.5" drives among various older towers, and a bunch of sata drives on two newer gaming towers. I have started doing spinrite testing on all my drives - I decided it's a once-a-year thing, to keep the drives refreshed. I also bought wd sentinel, and in discussion with the author, I am impressed by his approach, but I haven't evaluated it well enough. I do know, that you can't leave drives sitting on a shelf for years, and expect them to function - run them at least once a year, if not twice - a good run of several hours. Spinrite seems great for that.