Western Digital WD Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: It hasn't failed yet even though SMART reporting says there are problems with the drive. Quiet.

Cons: SMART monitoring reports lots of errors. Slow to respond. I won't buy another one of these "green" drives.

Overall Review: I got this drive as an experiment to see if I could live with the drive's limitations, and I hate it. The drive is slow, I can't trust it due to repeated SMART errors being reported, but it hasn't actually lost any data. I use it as a local mirror of a slow backup device so if it fails I won't lose anything, and it's still a bit faster than the networked backup device.

Pros: Price, this is an update to my previous review...Plugged in one drive as internal on Windows 7 system and drive worked fine. Was able to initialize using MBR and format. Retried in Sans Digital USB enclosure with FreeNAS and drive is still not detected.

Cons: Read that by inserting short on Pins 7&8 you can use these in WHS as data drive (NOT, NOT, NOT as System drive!!!). Tried it and it works fine. Guess I'll have to swap out my 3 existing 1TB in my Acer easyStore WHS for these 3 new ones...

Overall Review: Know what you're doing when purchasing these drives!!! You might have problems getting them to work in your setup but it does not mean the drives are bad. Knowing this I now wish I had purchased 1.5TB drives for a bit more $ and not have to move all my data around...added an egg cause the drives do work just a hassle if you don't know what you're getting into.

Pros: Quiet, power-efficient, good price. Also, fast enough. It's a 5400RPM drive, so that's what you get, but the performance of my RAID1 array is more than acceptable. I haven't had them a long time, so I can't tell you how reliable they will ultimately be, but here's what I know: They're been running continuously ever since I got them. SMART data reports good health for both drives. They also survived very heavy initial utilization when I was setting them up and copying on large files (Time Machine backups).

Cons: If you don't know what you're doing, you can get lousy write performance (a factor of 3.3 performance drop across the board, according to an article on OSNews). See Other thoughts.

Overall Review: You really need to know what you're doing if you're going to use these drives with Linux. Windows 7 reportedly does the right thing, while Windows XP does not. WD claims that Linux is "unaffected", but this is false, since many critical Linux tools like fdisk do not do the right thing by default. To use fdisk, create a primary partition like normal. Once the partition is created, type 'x' to get into expert mode, then use the 'b' command to move the starting sector of the partition. Make sure that it is an integer multiple of 8. The problem is that fdisk starts partitions on "cylinder" boundaries. The thing is, the cylinders are faked, and they're reported as being 63 sectors. As a result, your partitions will start on 63-sector boundaries. 63 is obviously not a multiple of 8. Move the start of your first partition to block 64, and it makes all the difference in the world. Same goes for all other partitions. Realign them.

Pros: This drive is fast, and dead silent. SSD + WD Green drive = quiet PC. Easy to install in Win7 x64. Plug it in, format & go. You must know how to take advantage of the drive. 1. AHCI s/b enabled in BIOS. 2. Do Not Quick format the drive. I know it's slow but your patience will be rewarded. 3. Win7 or Vista make it easiest to use. I have Win7 x64 and achieve Sustained write speed of 80mb/s with AHCI enabled over my Gbit network. Only 40mb/s write speed in IDE mode.

Cons: 1. You need to know what you're doing to take full advantage of the drive. 2. Full format these large drives folks.

Overall Review: Many people complain about the high failure rate of the 1 TB+ drives. I have 3 of the WD Green 1 TB drives. I have the 16mb & 32mb cache versions in my WHS & added the 64mb cache (this one) in my main PC. My 16mb version was having issues & was virtually unusable & I was about to RMA...I spent the time to reformat with a full format...that was over a year ago. All 3 WD Green 1 TB drives have been trouble free.

Pros: The disk is fast, quiet and cheap (per GB). It paves ways to get familiar with the advanced format disks that's going to take over the market eventually. After applying the WD Align-ment, I benchmarked transfer of 70G data to be under 20 minutes; that was more than two times faster than transfer the same amount of data to the 7200 rpm Seagate disk it replaces (but that one has bad sectors that's why it's slow to reallocate, anyway). The 5400 rpm really does not seem to slow down the disk, IF you have the partitions aligned correctly on 4K boundaries.

Cons: The WD Align tool should come with each of the disk sold, even if that adds $1 to the total cost. The label on the disk says that it will work with Other OS without adjustment, which is definitely incorrect with regard to Linux.

Overall Review: Here is how I make it works nicely on a Redhat Linux system. Forget about all the hacks you can find in Google; they may or may not work. What I did was simply partition the disk as I like it to be, and then, download and boot into the WD Align tool to have it correct my partitions. You can find the WD Align tool on the URL listed on the disk packaging. For the WD Align tool to recognize the partitions, you need to initially format them using mkfs.vat command. It doesn't matter if it's a Linux partition (code 82) or a Linux swap (code 83); just format them all to VFAT. After WD Align finished its job, you may now format the partitions to their right types.

Pros: Looks like a good drive, I was excited to get this.

Cons: Drive is being promoted as 3 year warranty, but if you check the Serial Number you can see it has less that 2 years left on an original 2 year warranty.

Pros: Silent, and fast! Works great as a backup drive or general storage.

Cons: none!

Overall Review: For those complaining of RAID problems: Read WD specs and website. This model does NOT support RAID. (No TLER) For RAID, use the WD AV-GP model drives.

Pros: Working well so far. It's installed in a Windows XP system as a single partition so I just set the jumper so I didn't have to manually deal with the 4K block size issue.

Cons: They don't supply the jumper. Silly, since it probably only costs 1 cent (or less). I had to pull one from an old dead drive that I had.