 | |  | | | Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Black SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5001AALS | | | | | | | |
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| $69.99 | |
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| $59.99 | |
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| | | SKU:
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| | Features | WD Caviar Black high performance 3.5-inch SATA hard drives co MBine 7200 RPM spin speed, 32 MB or 64 MB cacheHigh performance electronics architecture features dual processors and bigger, faster caches for maximum read and write speeds.StableTrac -- The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibrationWD Caviar Black high performance 3.5-inch SATA hard drives co MBine 7200 RPM spin speed, 32 MB or 64 MB cache, and SATA 3 GB/sStableTrac -- The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking500 GB capacity holds up to 100,000 digital photos, 125,000 MP3 files, and 60 hours of HD video; 5 year limited warrantyShips in Certified Frustration-Free Packaging
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| | Description | WD Caviar Black high performance 3.5-inch SATA hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 32 MB or 64 MB cache, SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and up to 2 TB capacity for the ultimate in power computing. Backed by a 5-year limited warranty. High Performance Electronics Architecture: Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance. Colossal cache – Bigger, faster cache of up to 64 MB means faster performance. Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture: Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy. StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations. NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit. Massive Capacity – WD Caviar Black SATA drives are available in capacities up to 2 TB. Compatible – We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems. 5 Year Limited Warranty. | |
| | Product Details | | Product Length: | 5.8 inches | | Product Width: | 4.0 inches | | Product Height: | 1.0 inches | | Product Weight: | 1.61 pounds | | Package Length: | 9.45 inches | | Package Width: | 6.38 inches | | Package Height: | 3.46 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.9 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 81 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 81 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 26 found the following review helpful:
 Great Drive, Terrible Packaging May 22, 2009
By R. Robinson
This is a fast, quiet, and reliable drive--I love it.
However, the reseller (Amazon) failed to package the OEM drive in manufacturer approved packaging as described in Western Digital's Warranty Services section of their website. I was disappointed to find that the drive had shifted in the two Airspeed Inflatable Packaging pillows and the drive was in direct contact with the cardboard box. In this position, the force of any fall would have been absorbed by the drive its self instead of the packaging.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 WD 500GB Internal Drive - Good Price - Remember it's OEM Dec 17, 2009
By Sea Star
I really did some research on drives and wanted something reliable after a bad experience with a Seagate drive. I decided on a 500GB as a second drive on my PC and the price and shipping situation with Amazon was primo. I ordered this hard drive with two-day delivery and received it packaged very well and in good working order. I've only had it a few days and it's working fine, so I don't have much to review about the performance at this time except to say it is quiet and has pretty fast access with the 32MB cache. I installed this as a second internal drive on an HP Pavillion a6257c desktop computer that's about two years old and is running Vista. It was recognized immediately by the Bios, Device Manager and by the Disk Management, but I had to use the Disk Management to actually install and format (two separate steps) the drive before it appeared in the My Computer listing for access. This only took a few minutes, and the steps are very easily followed and well written by a previous reviewer (Sandstone)so I won't repeat them here again.
The important thing to remember here is that this is an OEM drive. It doesn't come with anything for the installation, just the drive itself although some people said they received screws. You'll need a SATA (Serial ATA) cable that is usually red but can be other colors and a power cable (in my case I needed a 4 to 15 pin power cable converter because my PC only had 4 pin power connectors and the WD drive requires 15). I had empty SATA slots on my board, so that was no problem. You may have to get split cables if you don't have sufficient connectors in your computer for the added drive. My hard drive cage also had a space for a second drive, but I still had to provide my own screws. Luckily I had some in my Belkin Computer Tool Kit that fit. So, if you're putting this internally as a second drive, make sure you have the proper available hookups in your computer, then buy the appropriate power and SATA signal data cables to hook the drive to your computer and make sure they are long enough to reach. Also purchase computer screws similar to whatever is holding in your main hard drive to secure the new drive in your hard drive slot. My hard drive case required screws with fairly flat heads as the cage sits right up against the side of the computer case. If you don't have a hard drive slot, you may have to get brackets to use in your other slots in your PC. If you're replacing your main drive, you should have all the accessories needed.
I have seen some minor feedback about this drive being loud, but I cannot hear mine at all. It's really quiet; but, of course, it's secured quite tightly into the drive case so that might be a factor.
Overall -- it's a great drive for the money and I'm quite happy with the quality and speed of the drive as well as the Amazon shopping and shipping experience. If I have any issues down the line, I'll update this feedback.
18 of 24 found the following review helpful:
 WARNING: THIS IS NOT RAID ARRAY COMPATABLE! Jan 18, 2010
By The Bonedaddy
WARNING: THIS IS NOT RAID ARRAY COMPATABLE!
I researched this drive and it was portrayed as top of the line. I then ordered 2 of these Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD5001AALS. Then by chance I saw a review stating that these drives were not Raid Array compatible. Upon digging deeper on the web I found that this was true. Nowhere on Amazon or Western Digital's web site was this information available. I then cancelled this order as I was very disappointed and had never heard of a hard drive not capable of raid array.
Western Digital changed the firmware in the last quarter of 2009 so that all versions of these drives now shipping have the Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) setting permanently LOCKED with TLER READ and TLER WRITE both set as DISABLED, so the WDTLER.EXE utility no longer works to toggle TLER to ENABLED. In order to use these drives in a RAID you want to set TLER to ENABLED, but you can no longer do that by any method.
Western Digital never warned anyone of that firmware change, and doesn't even mark the boxes or documentation with this fact...nice eh. These drives can no longer be used in RAID ARRAY.
Therefore Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or a demanding enterprise environment. If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly.
This decision by Western Digital means that most or ALL of their desktop series drives CANNOT be used in a RAID setup, because the TLER setting will cause these drives to FAIL, there is nothing you will be able to do about it because TLER is now locked. Western Digital is trying to push those building RAID arrays into buying their much more EXPENSIVE WD "enterprise" series drives, which is certainly appropriate if the RAID will run in a 24x7 50% (or greater) heavy duty cycle enterprise (file server, or similar) environment. However, for light-duty use home RAID array the desktop drives have always worked fine, which is why WD's competitors have not locked in their desktop drive's firmware any RAID-incompatible settings.
After cancelling the order I received an insulting email from Amazon stating:
I've canceled this order completely--you haven't been charged for it. An authorization may be visible on your account, but (depending upon the policies of your bank) this should be removed shortly.
I understand that you were not able to find whether these drives are Raid Array compatible or not. The quickest way to get the information you need is to contact the manufacturer and get it directly from them.
Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. (India I think because of the signature).
To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
End email.
Errors flaws or assumptions in Amazon's short email:
1. My account should not be charged until shipment occurs.
2. I searched WD website prior to placing an order.
3. Email cannot be returned to customer service in India.
4. Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company. I think not!
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Pure problems Nov 07, 2010
By Luis Alvarado
"Daniel"
So, I don't have anything against western digital, for me they seem to be a nice company, but after this, I just can't say that, I bought this drive, tried to install Windows 7, and it doesn't works, gave me some errors. After that I plugged in my old maxtor drive, which works really well after 5 years of downloading tons of Gb from the internet and more than 20 formattings, and ran the WD tool downloaded from their site, so it showed me that it has too many bad sectors. I returned this item to Amazon, do I need to say that I live in Venezuela? Hell yeah, tons of money spent just in postage, more than the money I paid for the HD, so they gave me another drive, which has another date of manufactured, and came well packet as the first one, and completely new, my surprise, same problems, and I'm not doing the wrong stuff, even I scanned my old drive and the WD tool says it is pretty perfect, so the only stuff that works well is the WD tool, the drives are awful as the seagate ones. Even if you get the black caviar line you get problems, so how do you do? You pay more for the hardcore gamer item and it is pure garbage
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Setup can be TRICKY...Reading this may help you! May 14, 2010
By D. Colby
If you know how to setup this drive it's a piece of cake. If not, you may think you have a defective hard drive, or screwed something up, like I thought I did! It didn't show up in: Computer > Hard Disk Drives, after I connected the power supply cable and SATA cable to my motherboard. Oh great, I said to myself. The guy at Fry's had no idea what he was talking about. He said, "yeah, this thing is plug and play. You should be all ready to go when you hook it up!" Not! Who you need to talk to are the guys in the blue coats who fix the computers in the repair/setup department, or the geek squad guys at Best Buy, or Google it like I did!
I restarted my computer, and when it boots up and shows "press Esc to enter Setup", or something like that for yours, go into that setup mode. For you newbies, it can be used to change your boot drive priority settings (i.e., where your computer looks first to find your operating system to boot-up), or to just check out what hardware you have hooked up, like I did. As I said, it showed up as a recognized hard drive in my BIOS settings, so at least I knew it was working. However, using it as an auxiliary storage drive (slave drive), I didn't realize I had to go into the computer's control panel to set it up. If you've never done this before, it can be a little tricky but it's not too bad as long as you have some idea as to where to go in your Control Panel. Using windows Vista (it may be different for windows 7, I'm not sure) Go to: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management. This is where you can initialize, format, partition your drive, change/modify settings, etc. Once that's done you are ready to go!
I heard these are some of the BEST hard drives out there!!! You can also pick up a 1TB for $99.99, like I just did. Great value. I went down to my local electronics store, Fry's, and bought a stand-alone disk HDD drive copier. I used it to make a back-up of my current hard drive. It basically makes a completely bootable, mirror image copy of your hard drive in case your current one fails, gets a nasty virus, etc. I would highly recommend this because I don't like the software-type ways, like Norton ghost, etc. These back up your software onto another drive, but I like to know that I just created a "verbatim" copy the old-fashioned way. This, by the way, is how crime labs, forensics, and police, copy a person's hard drive for examination/evidence. I've never used the software backup methods before, but I have heard they can be a pain. They apparently can re-arrange your files, and don't do an EXACT mirror of your hard drive. I did this primarily due to my iTunes library. I spent tons of hours renaming and categorizing songs on the playlist. If you simply back up your songs on another drive, when you go to reload them you will have to start over! No way. I did that once before and never again.
That's just one example of why it's ideal to just make a mirror image copy onto another hard drive. You preserve the exact contents onto another drive. You can buy cheap copiers for around $50-$100 at stores or you can buy a nice one like the Aleratec 350103 1:1 HDD Cruiser Hard Disk Drive Duplicator (Black) tower unit, on Amazon for around $250. The nicer units are way better though. They have better quality connectors and components. You can observe the copy time (remaining time left for copy, etc.), and what's really nice is I think you can use these as external hard drives. You just insert an internal hard drive into the device and hook the unit up to your computer via a usb connection and tah-dah, you now have an external hard drive. It's not those traditional external (and high price) ones, that are not only more expensive but the are pre-loaded with annoying backup software programs that you CANNOT delete! They can be absolutely annoying from what I have read on reviews here on Amazon.com. Thank you reviewers!
See all 81 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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