WD Blue 2TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256MB Cache, 2 Year Warranty

Up until a few years ago i exclusively used Samsung Spinpoint Hard Drives simply because they were competitively prices, reliable and were quiet in operation. Sadly with Samsung moving to SSD production they have since stopped producing 3.5" drives and now only make 2.5" designed for laptops.Whenever i build a PC (either for myself or a customer) and mass storage is required then Western Digital Blue is the only range i now use. The "Blue" range is suppose to be Western Digitals all purpose Hard Drive. So far they seem reliable and are well priced and run at 7200RPM with 64mb cache. This particular HDD uses SATA-III (6GB/s) and conforms to the 3.5" drive standard. While there are some MINOR differences between this and the black (some internal structure looks different) speed wise they perform near identical. Indeed the reason why the Western Digital Blacks cost so much is because they have an extended warranty of 5 years as opposed to 2 years you get with the blue!VERDICT: Use a small SSD for your main boot drive containing the OS, then add one of these to hold all your games and music. It's a great combination. This is a OEM edition meaning you literally get the Hard Drive in the box and nothing else so ensure you have a spare SATA data cable. For the Money these are great!

What you should know is,It's a 2TB drive with about 1.86TB actual. I use it as a backup drive. It works fine and I'm very happy with it.

Western Digital are reliable. I have had more than a few mechanical drives fail on me but none of them have been Western digital. The drive is silent and great value for money. No cables come with this unit so if you do not have a new build and are purchasing this to add in an extra drive as opposed to replacing an old one do make sure you purchase the data cable and ensure that you have the power source cable as well or if you have a serial like mine which has four sockets in it, make sure one of the is free.So what can go wrong?Well for one thing since it is an unformatted drive, when you install it your computer will not show it on the "My computer" window in windows 7. You need to format the drive to NTFS (windows 7) and then it will show up. Partition the drive if you would like to and it should work well. Don't go returning the unit to Amazon as faulty as the next one will do exactly the same thing. (I didn't know this and looked at a video from newegg and it mentions this issue on new hard drives) Other than that its good reliable and cheerfully cheap. I have never installed a hard drive or built a new computer from scratch, but this was one of the easiest parts to install. Make sure you install it in the right data socket on your mother board as usually the new ones come with several SATA 6 and slower ones.

Delivery was prompt, arrived within 3 days of ordering which for free is quite good. Packaging I feel could be improved understand this is not a retail unit but being a disk drive with moving parts I was a bit concerned, never the less the product was fully functional.The WD blue is a budget friendly drive with good performance, read/write speeds are what you would expect from a Sata Hard drive going up to around 150MBs. The cache could probably be increased in size to 128MB in the larger models as 64MB seems quite low. Reliability of the drive seems good, it's stable after 6 months heavy use so have no concerns there. Since in the larger capacitys it spins at 5400RPM it's quiet compared to the other drives just not as quick as the Reds/blacks. When buying a Blue do not you get a 2 year limited warranty from Western digital instead of 3 or 5 years in higher end models. For reliability I would recommend the Red drives, for speed buy an SSD price per gigabyte is reasonable now, for value and high capacity for your photos/media this is a good buy with good price per gigabyte and quality relative to price point.

(for details on the drive, please skip down the page, underneath my rant)The product arrived on the date it should have, nice and early in the day. However, despite being in the house, waiting for the delivery, the driver 'presumed' that nobody was home and left it with a neighbour.WHY ?!?!?!? I have no idea. Odd if you ask me.Then on top of that, he never left a card to say its been left with a neighbour. So the only way to trace it was when later in the day I saw it said delivered and managed to trace the signature to a neighbour. However I am new to the area and this was a major annoyance.Its not hard to knock.... or ring the bell.... or leave a 'sorry you were not home card'____________________________REVIEW ON THE DRIVEThis drive was well reviewed and in some ways appears superior to the caviar black, especially on 1TB models like mine. The price was good (despite nearly a £1 rise overnight)I have had bad experiences in the past with Seagate. So tend to stick to brands i have had good experiences with. Sony, Samsung, Zalman, Corsair etcThe drive is fast, has 1TB of storage. Its SATA3 with a 64mb buffer. So performs nicely.The only grueling thing done so far was copying files over from an old SATA 1-250GB blue. The writing speed was impressive. Several groups of 40-60GB in less than 10 minutes each.5/5 for the drive5/5 for speedy shipping1/5 for stupid parcel force man2/5 for packing - 1 end of the drive was un-bubblewrapped.

Data drive for my new W11 PC. Excellent price and quick delivery. This is a very good option for a HDD.