Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Nice drive, quick and quiet

Cons: Note that older SATA chipsets will not recognize the drive unless you hard-set the drive to SATA 150 via jumper. The OEM package lacks a jumper so you have to supply your own

Comments: 1/4 terrabyte hard drive with a 300 MBit/sec transfer? Solid gold. I'm running two of these in RAID 0 on a new system I built and couldn't be happier. Word of advice to people using these as primary drives to install windows on? Use a WindowsXP SP1 or SP2 install CD. Otherwise, windows will think you have a 130GB drive, and not a 250GB.

Pros: Another winner from Western Digital. Great drive at a great price. Data Lifeguard Tools are great for transferring data from the old drives to the new.

Cons: OEM drive did not come with a jumper which made installation a little more difficult.

Overall Review: Normally SATA drives do not need jumpers, however, if you have a motherboard that only supports the older SATA 150 standard then you MUST ensure that you install a jumper across pins 3-4. This will allow your system to see the harddrive. Otherwise your mobo might call out a hardware failure and not boot.

Pros: Solid disk. You can't ask for more than that from a 7200 RPM disk.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: To address a couple of complaints I saw about this disk: 1. The Gentoo installer and the windows installer both worked fine at startup. Both XP and Linux have tools that will allow you to format the drive without getting anything from the internet. 2. It really is a 250 GB drive, the windows installer (without SP2) will only see the first 131069MB no matter how big the drive is. That is what comes from using a lame, closed source OS. Both Debian and Gentoo were capable of using the whole disk at install time.

Pros: Very fast, very clean operation.

Cons: Had some problems hooking it up to my ABIT KW7 board. My board just would not see the drive at all. I thought at first it was driver incompatability issues, and searched darn near every technical forum out there, but come to find out it was really very simple. What threw me off course was all the other people having the same issues, But what it came down too was me not reading the manual for my board close enough... Ya ok you can laugh now... lol My board is only SATA Series 1 compatable and not SATA Series II like this one. Just put in the jumper to downgrade it and bam picks it right up...

Overall Review: READ YOUR MANUALS PEOPLE IT HELPS...

Pros: Outstanding Newegg customer service. I was able to get new drive from Newegg to transfer data over before sending in failing drive. Five +++ stars for Newegg.

Cons: Brought in March '07. Had 1-year replacement guarantee, down to 30-days now. Second W.D. drive of same type to fail on me this year.

Pros: I have 2 of this model drive. On failed after 90 days. WD had me a new one barely a week after I sent in the bad one. I started to give this a 4, but this is the first WD that has failed in over a decade. I've had multiple failures of 2 other major brands.

Cons: The drive failed so fast that from the time I got a warning message (SMART system} I was unable to transfer data 5 minutes later. Noise indicates is was a physical internal problem.

Overall Review: There are over 20 WD drives in computers I maintain. One is 8 yrs old. I have others that were working when retired due to being too small, under 6GB.

Pros: I have two of these drives in my computer. It gives me a good amount of storage without breaking the bank. The bonus is that they are quiet and much more stable than the Mxxxors that I previously had (but then again what isn't).

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: Just a point to address about all the reviews complaining about actual drive capacity being less than advertised. Do some research first! Google is your friend. Actual drive sizes will most always be less than advertised. Manufacturers know that we aren't all geeks so they like to advertise easy to understand base 10 numbers instead of the real geek math which is base 2. This results in a discrepancy. Maybe it doesn't make it right, but it is what it is - if we can't make the vendors change it, it at least helps to understand why it is different.