Western Digital Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: My two oldest WDCB 1TB drives are approaching their 5th year of service. As in 42,000 hours of 24/7 on demand read and write at any given time service. They are still working well. It is true they aren’t nearly as fast as they once were, nor as quick as their newer versions installed right alongside them. However, they are still as dependable as the day I first installed them. I wasn’t going to bother with a review, as these drives are fairly old by technology standards, but as someone thought a 1 egg review was acceptable for a product that worked for five years and suddenly died just after warranty, I felt it necessary to counter with the quality of service I’ve had with the 2 WDC 1TB drives over the past 5 years. These are installed in a system designed and used 75% of the time running video games, 20% streaming music (from these very HDDs as well as online), and 5% ‘real’ work. 24/7. I shut it off every few weeks or so because it’s an electronic device, and its software is developed by humans. In other words, it’s not perfect, and at times requires power cycling. I have 2 additional WDCB 1TB drives installed that have seen about half the service time these two FAEX ones have, and I have no doubt I’ll end up replacing them with multi-TB SSDs long before they cease functioning. Western Digital are the only drives I buy for systems I build, and the only ones I recommend when choosing to install mechanical HDDs. Obviously, my experience with these drives is a drop in the bucket relative to the hundreds of millions of HDDs installed over the years, from multiple companies, across the entire world. It’s always possible one may have a radically different experience when using these drives. If so, by all means reflect that in a review or statement. 1 Egg for 5 years of operation, (we have zero knowledge of how the drive was installed and used by the user… I’ve seen computers buried under 50 pounds of books and paper, stuffed animals and and a few dozen layers of dust… this environment would be detrimental to electronic equipment), doesn’t exactly do wonders for credibility.

Cons: Well, 2 of these drives have not quit on me after nearly 5 years of 24/7 service, what am I suppose to put here?

Pros: Good performance. Was a good size (see other thoughts).

Cons: Runs a little hot (like many 7200 RPM) hotter than the newer Seagates (ST310000524AS and ...8AS) 7200 RPM.

Overall Review: Drives just keep getting bigger and cheaper.

Pros: Western Digital Caviar Black. I only buy WD and I only buy Caviar Black. With the sheer number of drives I use, there is no beating the quality of these drives. I have had far more luck with these than any other brand or series of drives.

Cons: Price. However that is out of the hands of the drive makers. Demand > supply. Simple Economics 101. Though the prices are starting to drop. None with the drive itself.

Overall Review: Purchased to use as a third dedicated "games" drive. Serving that purpose well.

Pros: 1TB. 7200rpm.

Cons: Died.

Overall Review: Windows installed and running for almost 4 years. Many many formats, installs, partitions created\deleted. Should last forever not just 3-4 years.

Pros: Good speed and quiet, runs cool.

Cons: None that I can find so far.

Overall Review: Here's a suggestion for anyone buying a hard drive, go with FedEx, the express saver is the cheapest. I know it cost more than UPS and Newegg's "free shipping" isn't FedEx, but here's the deal: I have bought over 30 hard drives (Western Digital and Seagate) through Newegg in the past 2 years, 100% of the ones shipped FedEx are still running, 80% of the ones shipped UPS were either DOA or failed within 6 months. UPS beats the He11 out of their shipments, even their website states that every package is subject to a 6 foot drop. Do the math, free shipping or cheaper UPS shipping isn't free in the long run. I ship my non-fragile items with the free shipping, but I do a separate order and use FedEx for hard drives and Motherboards.

Pros: I'm not going to repeat what others have said. I'll say that Newegg is amazing when it comes to shipping. I ordered 1/23/09 & got it 1/26/09. I would have had it sooner were it not for the weekend. I can say from my professional standpoint that WD has the lowest failure rate of all P/SATA drives. I won't mention their SCSI drives ;-) The innovations that are included in this drive aren't themselves revolutionary, but in the combinations that they are used in this one drive make it brilliant.

Cons: None, see "other comments"

Overall Review: Let's make this clear: OEM drives DO NOT come with mounting hardware or cables. This is not a con nor should that be considered a failing on Newegg or Western Digitals part. Make sure you have your own hardware. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED. This is a high performance drive. IT'S GOING TO BE WARM. you've been warned. To those who give a rating of one "egg" because the drive was DOA need to re-rate the item when the RMA is resolved. A DOA can be for many reasons & should not reflect the drive series as a whole. Actually this applies to ANYTHING you review. Those 'bad' reviewers need to remember to go back & make a review based on the working units performance. Hard drives are rated in Millionbytes, not MEGABYTES. Therefore a 750GB drive will format to less than 700GB 750GB/1.073=698GB minus the normal bit loses from formatting. This is NOT misrepresentation of hard drives. Stop complaining. Finally, do your own homework to ensure compatibility BEFORE you buy.

Pros: HD Tune: Transfer Rate: Min= 56.9 MB/s Max= 113.3 MB/s Avg= 90.9 MB/s Access Time: 11.9 ms Burst Rate: 127.9 MB/s CPU Usage: 3.8% Pretty decent stats, just as good as the 640GB Black Edition. Drive is running solid, silent and cool. Weighs just as much as my old WD1600(160GB) SATA I Drive. Got this with the 10 off discount, plus UPS shipped it without any damage. ^_^

Cons: Would have been nice to be a 1 or 2 platter design. An updated version of the WD software could help.

Overall Review: Hopefully Newegg ships HDs more like this more often to have less complaints. WD should make a Raptor version of these drive or a SSD version.

Pros: Lots of disk storage, 3-platter high-density design, 32 MB cache

Cons: TLER issue

Overall Review: At this time I'm only judging the drive on the TLER issue and not it's performance. The star rating could go up or down later on. The TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) issue for WD drives has been around for a while. I do not think WD is trying to "put one over" on consumers. What they're doing is simplifying their offerings to make it easier for those less knowledgable to pick the correct drive(s) for their system. The RE (RAID Edition) drives come with TLER enabled which allows them only a limited time (7 sec.) to make any read/write error corrections. This is to prevent the drive from dropping out of a RAID setup (excluding RAID 0). The Black drives are meant to be used as single drives in desktop applications. In that environment you want the drive to make corrections if it can. Contrary to what WD says you CAN enable TLER on Black drives to be used in a RAID setup using THEIR own utility. Just Google WDTLER.zip or TLER.iso for a CD boot image that contains Caldera DOS.