WD 1 TB Performance Hard Drive - Black

This is a very good drive indeed, and is the best performing of the regular WD drive line.The 'Blue' series drives are the standard good drives for everyday use. (These are the only ones that come in both SATA 6 Gb/s and the older PATA 100 MB/s connection styles; all others are only SATA). The max. capacity for these is 1 TB.The 'Green' drives are focused on low energy consumption and therefore have lowest spin ratings (making them slower) but keep very cool & quiet. These go all the way up to 6 TB.The 'Purple' are designed for low spin use with ATA streaming & AllFrame technology designed with surveillance video footage recording in mind. These go up to 4 TB.The 'Red' series drives are designed for RAID array systems. These go all the way up to 6 TB.The 'Black' series are designed for the best performance for gamers and graphic artists with fast spin-rates, Vibration Control Technology (VCT) and Corruption Protection Technology (CPT) to prevent data loss in the case of power failure to the unit. These go up to 4 TB.The only drive that WD make faster and better than the Black series is the VelociRapter series with the fastest spin cycles and it's own custom vibration and cooling bracket. These are more triple the price on a GB-by-GB cost ratio. See Western Digital Velociraptor - 1TB Desktop SATA Hard Drive - OEMThese "Black" drives are really the best of the regular series for high performance computing. I have mine installed as a bootable Windows OS main HDD, and it outperforms the previous drive, even though it was only a 200 GB drive. You'd think for so little space, verses a 1 TB drive, that the 200 GB drive would be faster as there's so much less space to have to scan. But the WD Black is as good with five times the capacity.It's very quiet and performs quickly with no read/write errors upon diagnostic scan tests.The packaging was satisfactory (not an original fancy box). It was in an anti-static bag, with plastic spacers on each end, that was in turn in a cardboard box that was then placed in another cardboard box with filler.One little tip: If your are replacing an old HDD that was MBR format, and intend to clone it to this drive, then format this new drive to MBR as well, not GPT (even though the latter is a better system) to prevent problems in the cloning.The 5 year warranty is a real bonus as well. Just go to the WD website and register the drive. Such a long warranty (the longest WD offer for a product; others being 2 or 3 years only) shows that they've really put a lot into making these units in a high quality manner giving peace-of-mind for your data.I would recommend these drives to anyone looking for the best drive, that's affordable, for high performance computing.

These drives receive almost universally positive reviews, and my experience is no different. I'm using this as a games drive and it has given me many hours of happy gaming with zero issues. Installation is simple, using the standard 4 screw arrangement or whatever HDD mounting brackets may exist in your case. Plug in the SATA cable and it's ready to go. This replaced an old 5400rpm drive, and there is a noticeable performance improvement even though I have it connected to a SATA2 motherboard and can't experience the drive at full transfer speed (I'll upgrade eventually). Western Digital have a great reputation for reliability and a decent warranty so I'm expecting this drive to last for many years. I'll probably buy a couple more at some point, maybe for a RAID setup, or perhaps just to increase overall capacity.

Brought one of these to replace a Barracuda 1TB that failed.I've had it for 2 months now and its a fantastic little bit of kit.The Delivery was fast, arriving in 2 days.The product it self was well secured and protected in the boxing, An issue i've had ordering from other stores online.If you are debating if you want to Order a Blue or Black series, Id recommend paying that little bit extra for the Black.It comes with an extended warranty (5 years). Also from what i've read the black also has very slight performance gains, as well as better product testing, Making it more reliable.Making the Black a better all rounder for just about everything.I've lost 3 1TB harddrives just after they have went past the warranty in the last 2 years, So having this warranty will be a nice safety net !

Bought to replace WD hard drive in my late 2010 21.5" imac. There are a couple of modifications you have to do for it to work ok in a Mac but pretty straight forward. Am grateful for the advice given by another reviewer, "Pentax", who told me what to do.For the 2010 iMac you firstly have to shave off the locator tab on the Mac's hard drive temp sensor plug as there is no slot to take it on the new drive. I did it carefully with a craft knife.Next, I swapped the wires round on this plug so the darker wire was at the top and the lighter one below. These just pushed out of the plug ok with the thick end of a needle and then easily inserted back into the plug the opposite way round. If you don't do this your cooling fans will go nuts apparently. The drive was then good to go and installed fine. There is advice on this at:http://blog.macsales.com/19617-diagnosing-2009-2010-imac-fan-speed-issues-after-upgrading-the-main-hard-drive.Some bloggers are saying that when you do this the fans may not work properly and thus will shorten the life of the drive but all seems fine and there is a widget you can download to monitor the temp etc.. called istat. So, well pleased and while some reviews say that the drive is noisy, mine isn't at all.