Western Digital Blue WD5000AAJS 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: To the person below (rlbog) and others who may not know: all 500GB drives are actually 465GB, regardless of manufacturer. (35GB is Not lost - it was never there) - this is due to hard drive manufacturers rating their drives on base 10 (decimal) while microprocessors (CPU's) operate in the binary realm (base 2). (in decimal, 1K is 1000, whilst in binary, 1K is 1024, and thus the ''discrepancy''.)

Cons: None - perhaps I am just lucky, but every hard drive that I have ever purchased from newegg is still 100% functional, with the oldest being a 160GB. Of course, I take care to NOT static zap the drives while installing them & I don't move them if PC is on.

Overall Review: To the reviewer below who stated "missing items" and blamed newegg - no items were missing - this is an OEM product, which includes ONLY the bare drive. That is why it is cheaper than the Retail Box version - you shouldn't have given a 2 egg because of this. Look up OEM and you'll see.

Pros: This is a relatively fast, efficient and reliable SATA II (3.0GBS) drive. The price is excellent and newegg backs what they sell. This drive is backwards compatible with SATA 1.5GB hardware, but you have to install a jumper on the proper pins of the jumper block - see other thoughts. If you format this by normal means, as noted in other reviews, it can take two hours. It is faster to boot from your XP cd and do a quick NTFS format, but it is better to download Data LifeGuard Tools from the western digital website - this allows the drive to be properly formatted in a matter of minutes.

Cons: These aren't really cons, but rather a fact of buying OEM. OEM saves you money, but you get the bare drive only - no mounting hardware, manuals, software or cabling. The retail version of this drive includes everything you need to install the drive but costs more. CON: This is a con - the drive does not include the jumper cap to set the drive to SATA 1.5GB if you need to do so.

Overall Review: In order to set this drive to work with SATA 1.5GB (I don't have a SATA 2 controller, so this was necessary for me), you have to find a jumper cap - I took one from an ancient 3.2Gb drive. Place the jumper cap across pins 5 and 6 on the 8 pin jumper block on the drive. The drive label identifies the pin numbers, but this will be the second set of pins to the right of the sata cable connector. Don't forget, you'll need to get mounting screws and the sata cable, as they don't come with OEM drives. Also, go download Data LifeGuard Tools - you'll thank me :-)

Pros: HD Tune 2.54 results: Average Transfer: 63.8MB/s Access = 13.1ms Burst = 123.7 MB/s

Cons: None (unless it fails)

Overall Review: The drive is more quiet than my very quiet fans. 5 stars

Pros: It's a Western Digital Caviar drive. It's quiet, it's SATA (only), runs cooler than smaller WD drives I use. LOT's of capacity. Also, as another reviewer noted; for those that don't know much about building your own systems; don't give a drive a bad rating because you buy a 500gb drive and once it's formatted you don't have 500gb. NO DRIVE gives you full capacity, and you lose even more when formatted as a boot drive. It has ALWAYS been this way. For those of you that truly *do* have a high understanding of computer components, this is a great, quiet, cool drive. I bought 2 for a system build for a small recording studio. 1 drive for software and OS and one for recording tracks. Works nice.

Cons: People that write negative reviews because they don't understand formatting or getting a mobo or OS to recognize a SATA drive.

Overall Review: Buy it.

Pros: Good speed and size for the price.

Cons: None so far. I really haven't had a single hang-up.

Overall Review: For a drive that you want to install hand it 'just works', this does. I plugged it in, copied my data, and have been running it as my media store (video and downloads) ever since. No problems.

Pros: Excellent drive and so far has been running very nicely. Highly recommend and thanks as usual WD.

Cons: None

Pros: Bought 2 to install in a D-Link DNS-232 NAS. Worked right out of the box, no issues.

Cons: None

Overall Review: Up for Over a Month

Pros: Cheap and fast. hdparm reports 98.07 MB/sec disk reads and 5914.49 MB/sec disk reads

Cons: None yet. I bought 15 of these for RAID drives 2 months ago and no SMART failures yet.