Western Digital Blue WD6400AAKS 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Was good as a boot drive, still good as a data drive.

Cons: None

Pros: Purchased 3 years ago as my OS drive, but now it runs as a spare and runs my page file. Still runs with no problems.

Cons: Only 16MB of cache.

Overall Review: HDTune 2.55 on my SATAII controller: Avg Transfer rate - 92.3MB/s Access time - 12.6ms

Pros: I finished running Western Digital's drive diagnostics utilities and it reported no errors. One thing I noticed was that it took 1.5 hours to scan this 640GB drive while ii took me 2 hours to scan my WD SE16 500GB drive. Right off the bat, it seems like this drive is faster. I found a free utility called HD-Tach and run some basic test in the trial version. The maximum burst rate for this drive was 160 megabytes per second. The average was 90 megabytes per second. For comparison my HD SE16 500GB drive had 140 megabytes per second for the maximum and 60 megabytes per second for the average. Seriously, this is a really good drive. Western Digital hasn't published any buffer to disk rates for this drive on its website just yet. I think it's going to be pretty high.

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: This drive has a 3 year warranty from WD. Western Digital doesn't have 5 year warranties for this class of drives.

Pros: High performance, very quiet.

Cons: No history, hard to say what reliabilty will be.

Overall Review: WD's 2 platter design using their new 320GB/platters. HD Tach measured average transfer rate reflects the high-density platters with a rate of close to 91MB/s. Exceptional...better than a Raptor. (But of course the access times don't match a Raptor's.)

Pros: The 640AAKS is the best desktop drive on the market right now IMO. It's half the platters with more space than all the other drives at ~$0.17/gb. So it's faster, quieter, and more reliable than any drive in that class. Note the 500AAKS & 7200.11 have four platters and the 640AAKS only two platters--fewer moving parts. According to WD 32mb cache showed minimal speed improvement over 16mb cache. I decided to go with fewer platters over more cache.

Cons: I used a 7200.10 on a prior build and it was quieter. These are quiet, but they do make noise. Under load it sounds like low frequency wind blowing through a tube. NewEgg MUST get Memphis packaging QC up to standards. Is being cheap on packing tape worth the RMAs? I was shocked to see how poorly packaged my expensive order was. I've never had a problem before, but this was unacceptable. The box was half open with the 3 HDs exposed. They were hot from sitting open to the sun. I was concerned one would fail. A single short strip of tape was used to inadequately cover the box top. TAPE IT PROPERLY!

Overall Review: I have three and they run great. My numbers: 1 640AAKS = 110mb/sec 2 640AAKS Matrix Raid 0 = 200mb/sec

Pros: FAST, QUIET, & COOL. Bought 4 of these to replace my 4x250GB array, and the WD640GB's are literally TWICE as fast and silent. Old drives would average a temp of 105; WD640 drives are averaging at about 96F (using hddtemp). My benchmarks (hdparm,bonnie++,zcav) show that the fastest of my batch of drives reads at an amazing max 119MB/s, with the remaining 3 maxing at around 110MB/s. linux mdraid benchmarks: 4xRAID0 RAW READ/WRITE is about about 416MB/s, but RealWorld bonnie++ ext3 (noatime,nodirtime,data=writeback) benchmarks place it closer to ~340MB/s read, ~320MB/s write. With 4xRAID5 ext3 (default) it's about 225MB/s read, 147MB/s write.

Cons: All 4 drives passed WD's DLG diagnostics, but according to my ZCAV benchmarks, one of the four drive's throughput is over 50% slower for the first 5GB, then ramps up to full speed. I suspect there are quite a few relocated bad sectors here for whatever reason. Not worth the hassle for me to RMA the drive because of it; I've just made sure that /boot and a little-used contiguous LogicalVolume that follows it live in that location to minimize impact. Batch details FYI: Drive S/N is WD-WCASY0019757; Firmware: 01.03B01

Pros: Very fast. Quiet. Throughput measures almost identical to my 150GB Raptor.

Cons: This replacement drive was also sent from newegg in barely a single layer bubble-wrap around the factory-sealed antistatic bag, then tossed into shipping carton. I was relieved this second drive worked.

Overall Review: Had to wait more than two weeks turnaround for the RMA replacement drive, plus I had to pay for the DOA return shipping charges. Two of my last three HDDs arrived DOA. I most likely won't order any other OEM HDDs from newegg until I read shipping conditions have improved.

Pros: Fast, Quiet and Read times are excellent. HD Tach shows my speeds are barely under the raptors read and seek times. 598 gb when formatted, and a good price per gb. Never had any problems from WD.

Cons: None that I can think of.

Overall Review: To the guy who said he had to buy a cable and wasnt told it didnt come with one....READ...it says OEM not RETAIL. Know the difference.