This highly advanced and high performance 2 TB Western Digital performs extremely well so far. The most unique feature of this drive is the off platter parking and locking when powered down. With this feature, the platters are not likely to suffer shock damages from the heads pounding from rough handling while being shipped. Speaking about shipping, Amazon.com as well as many other online retailer should do a better job of packaging OEM hard drives for shipping. My drive was shipped double boxed with the outer box slightly larger with an airbag pillow on one end. The inner box appear to be supplied by Western Digital with two plastic cushioning inserts on the ends and does appear to be adequate. The outer box practically does not offer any more protection from shock damages. The outer box should have been large enough to be fitted with some foam cushioning all around. The other desirable feature that this drive has is that it has dual processors and dual activators for the heads for precise tracking. The secondary activator utilizes piezoelectric technology to really fine tune in on the exact track on the platter quietly. This of course improved performance somewhat.
I purchased this hard drive to use for additional storage on my computer. Because of the high-performance nature I feel this hard drive also makes an excellent boot drive for Windows. Of all the hard drive I ever purchase, it also produced the least amount of vibration when on. It's about as quiet as my Seagate hard drives. The only difference is that it makes the clunk sound occasionally when powered down when the heads park and lock. I'm paranoided from experience with my last two Seagate hard drive purchase that had growing reallocated section count shortly after placed in service. To make sure that I have a sound drive, right after installation I ran Western Digital's own Data Iifeguard For Windows to check for bad sections by running the complete surface scan. This software can be downloaded from Western Digital website. . I also ran a surface scan on this drive using HD Sentinel Pro. Both tests passed with no problems.
Final thoughts: Because this Western Digital is better engineered than any of my previous hard drive, my hope is for longtime reliability. So far I'm fully impressed with the performance I have been receiving. When I ran a benchmark, the maximum read speed was almost 140 MB per second and the minimum was around 70 MB per second. Take for example when transferring files from one hard drive to another. I did an experiment on copying files on copying files from my old storage drive to my new drive. When the file is copy single file at a time the speed remains almost full of around 100 MB per second. But when I copy two files at the same time, the speed chokes down to around 25 MB per second for the two files. I try again on copying two files accept at this time, one file gets copied to the new drive and the other file is copied to my boot drive. The speed also get choked down again to around 25 MB per second for the two files. This proves in a way that the bottleneck is on my old storage drive.
I tried this transferring test again except the new drive is the source this time. I copied one file to my old storage drive as well as copying another file to my boot drive at the same time. Only this time the speed remains the same on whether I copy one file or copying two or more files at the same time. The transfer speed remains close to 100 MB per second whether copying one file or two files at the same time.
I bought this drive for use in my iMac. I have a large collection of dvd rips that i wanted to store onboard inside of the iMac instead of having them spread across multiple drives. With this drive, I now have everything in side of the machine.
I have noticed many people complaining about drive failure. I must be very fortunate to have never had a HDD fail on any machine I have ever owned. However, just in case, I do have all of my files backed up across multiple drives and plan to buy the 2TB caviar green version to use as my time machine drive in the near future.
In short, get this drive if you want massive storage and good performance.
Updated on Mar 19, 2010