this is a good reliable drive for older hardware
342730
Even though platter-drives are going the way of the dinosaur, I needed to replace the disk on a co-worker's Toughbook.  The black series is the performance line of WD and still provides reliability.  I'm spoiled with SSD's now, but for certain purposes, this is a good reliable drive for older hardware.
451099
a good price for and old laptop drive with pata connection. Has been operating for months and is still good.
830506
I have several external drives, but this is now my go to drive for backups and external storage.  It may not be the absolute fastest drive out there, but it handles USB 3.0, it's very reliable and has a 5TB capacity for the best bang for the buck factor.  I keep forgetting how much space is actually on this drive so there is no issues with large backups.  It will also turn off when the USB port powers down, if your PC has that feature. Some stay powered on.  Great for LInux and Windows, which is what I use it for.
3609560
This hard drive is no spring chicken and looks it! But under the scuffs and the worn labels, it still works like a new drive! At a very affordable price (<$20, including shipping), it's ideal for adding/replacing hard drives in old computers that can't recognize today's huge drives; in my case, a 1995 COMPAQ that originally came with a 720MB Quantum hard drive. Although there's no telling how long such a used drive will last, I consider it a good bargain for hobbyists and sentimental folk that just can't toss their first computer to the recyclers.
2517861
I have purchased several of these over the past few years for use in a home file server.

These are reliable drives. I am running four of these in a file server, soon to be five, and have been running them for around three years with zero failures or SMART warnings. No drive lasts forever, but so far these just keep trucking along. When the inevitable drive failure occurs, I will likely replace the drives with the same model if it is still available. I highly recommend GSmartControl. It runs in both Linux and Windows, is free/open source, and will provide a full SMART report including the usual indicators of a drive that is going to fail: bad sectors, and number of reserve sectors available. Once a drive has bad sectors and starts remapping reserve sectors, it is time to start migrating data before the inevitable data loss occurs. So far, three years in, I have not a single bad sector across four of these drives.

Speed-wise, they are what you would expect from a 5400 RPM spinning hard drive. Nowhere near the fastest, but fast enough for what I need them to be. Install an SSD for your boot/OS drive, maybe a WD Black 7200 RPM drive for programs, and use these for storing your media files. The important thing to do is gauge what level of performance you need for a particular task and how much money you are willing to spend.

For mass data storage where speed is not a requirement, these drives work very well and I highly recommend them. If you need performance, look at SSDs. If you need speed but also size and do not want to spend a ton of money on a large SSD, look at the WD Black 7200 RPM drives.
337722
I got this drive to add to my HP Media Vault 2120.

The nice thing here is that Amazon has the "D" version of this drive for the same price as the "C" version. WD7500AADS has 32 MB of cache where the WD7500AACS only has 16 MB of cache.

I purchased the WD7500AACS to replace the original drive in the media vault and with the 2 drives, I have 1.3 GB of space. Woohoo!!

The drive seems to be quite reliable as the NAS is up and running all the time and because the drives are running all the time, it was nice to get the "Green" line that produces less heat. Even after hours of running the drives, they are still cool to the touch. This is important as most computer hardware is running hotter then ever and to minimize the heat in your system, you should use as much green devices as possible.

I have had both versions of the 750 Caviar Green HDDs and I am definitely a fan. Fast access seek time, lower power comsumption and lower temperatures. What is not to like?

Oh.. one extra note. Western Digital's HDD utilities do not work on Vista. Come on WD, Seagate has had their DiscWizard tool working on Vista for years now. We are almost on Win7. Get a new version of the utilities out.
4965733
When I buy hard drives, I buy them primarily based on their cost and speed. I don't care about any of their purported automatic backup programs and never bother installing them. For about $100 for 3TB, this is a good buy. USB 3.0 is plenty fast and even if your computer is older and has only USB 2.0, this drive will still work, albeit at a reduced speed.

Seagate is a very reliable brand and have about 8 other drives in various capacities. None of them have given me any problems. The only times I've had hard drives issues was due to neglect and damage by me (snagging a USB cord and sending the drive crashing to the floor, for example).
3373543
This drive has performed well for about 1 year now, no problems at all.  I use it in laptops, netbooks, "net-tops" (media center tiny PC), desktops and hesdless pc servers.  OS's used without a need to install drivers (to read and write): xp, vista, win7, ubuntu, freeNAS, BartPE, Norton Ghost, Accronis.

I paid $53, and am very satisfied.
1810524
A good value for the money, but we've had constant drive failures. Currently replacing our fifth drive since purchasing this enclosure
4670380
I really like Western Digital hard drives. I've purchased a number of their drives over the years and have always been pleased with their performance and reliability. This drive was just perfect for a replacement in an older PC.
144367
I bought this hard-drived pre-owned.  I had no idea how long it had been in another machine.  So far (about a month), it's worked faultlessly.  I use it in an external enclosure for backup purposes.  It seems to function well for that purpose.  I partitioned it into two partitions - a 250 GB EXT3 and a 750GB NTFS.  I connect to a Linux system and a Win7 system via USB.  I've had no problems with either.
4666328
Seagate has had some problems in the past (who hasn't) but they have been around long enough to turn out a good drive.  This is no exception.  Loading of often used apps seems a little quicker but all the queuing is really invisible to the user.  Good value for this amount of storage.
4313300
no problems with drive, no bad sectors, works perfectly as portable data bank
4448987
This drive was recommended for use with UNraid as the boot drive and it has worked flawlessly for 2 years in that capacity.
1207110
I love this drive!  I feel that I really got my money's worth.  There are alot of other options available from other companies with more name recognition (I'd never heard of Lacie).  This drive has been reliable, fast, and the part that makes me happiest of all - CHEAP in comparison to similiar devices by other companies.  Overall I'm very happy with this hardware, so much that I just recommended it to one of my friends who was in the market for an external drive.  I've been working in IT for 10+ years and having equipment that is reliable and inexpensive is always a pleasure.
2585675
Hey may not be a new fast drive but it's plenty fast on old systems. Used this with a Pentium 4 system and XP just flew. It's from 2004 so don't expect it to be a speed demon.
971499
I bought a Western Digital WD10EALS Caviar BLUE harddisk last week from a local retailer to upgrade my old 320GB Western digital disk.

There was a problem with the initial harddisk I bought which turned into a 32MB hard disk after successfully partitioned and formatted it. After tested by the retailer, I got a replacement.

However, the replacement harddisk works perfectly and is much quiet and more fast than my old 320GB disk. Overall, I am happy with this harddisk and it seems the Blue range does perform as what it is claimed to be - Performance + Reliability ("Reliability" needs to be verified by the time).

I give it for 4-star because of the initial issue, otherwise I believe it is worth for 5-star.