Pros: - Only had 47 hours on it when it showed up; I'll call that brand new. - While it makes some odd noises, none of the noises it makes are very loud. Certainly can't tell it makes any more noise than its 9 WD Red friends. - Didn't run a real benchmark on it, but write performance seemed pretty good.

Cons: - Manufacturing date of August 2015. - When I look my drive's serial number up on HGST's site, it says "Please return drive to the point of purchase or system manufacturer." So hopefully the drive just has a nice long life and I don't have to find out how good goHardDrive's warranty service is. - The drive takes significantly longer than most drives to spin up and respond to commands, my SAS2116 on FreeBSD wasn't able to find it at first. I increased hw.mps.spinup_wait_time significantly, and now it finds it. On a Linux system the kernel had time to throw a handful of warnings about the drive not responding before it got around to waking up.

Overall Review: - The drive showed up in a western digital box, with standard WD plastic "mounts" or whatever in the box. Strange, but at least reasonably packed. - The antistatic bag was at least sealed well enough that I can't tell if it was the original manufacturer bag.