WD 320GB 3.5-inch PATA Internal Hard Drive - Caviar Blue

Hi all, I bought one of these after reading all the reviews, seemed like a good buy, but....The drive is sold as 250gb, eide/pata, it is a 150gb drive with a 127gb capacity.On registering the product with Western, their system shows it as 320gb SATAII.There is no warranty on these drives as they come up as 'out of area'On querying all this Western have traced the original supply to APAC which is in Uganda, hence no warranty.Investigation ongoing with myself and the seller, with Amazon and with Western Digital.The drive does work fine, but that's hardly the point.I will revise or update this review when I have heard back so in the meantime, buy with extreme caution.Heard back from Western Digital, they are sure what has happened with this drive, it was sold into APAC, Uganda, there they take a lesser drive, smaller drive in my case and put that into the case, then they take a label from a 250gb drive, copy it and stick it on this African frankenstein drive and 100's of others no doubt, no warranty, no genuine drive, robbed.Mailed supplier today, Digital Components Ltd (dclstore), no response as yet.They have now sent RMA and taken the drive back for refund, very apologetic and professional to deal with, unlike Marius below.I would suggest anyone wanting one of these drives, ask the seller to open it and check on Western Digitals website that the drive size matches their database, then when you get it check the size of the drive on your system, if it all adds up it should be genuine, if they check on the WD database and their 250gb drive is listed as 320gb, and on a system it shows as 150gb, it's a fake.I then bought another one off here, registers as it should at 250gb, I've found out the 127gb limit is down to windows xp so ignore that part, but this new drive although it checks out and has warranty, the 3 year warranty is only in fact 155 days! I have escalated that to see if they will increase the warranty, weeks I have been waiting for that, if not this new one has to go back too, I have wasted hours and hours, or should I say days and days, to get to this point, where I may even have to start all over again, better to buy direct and it's cheaper, if only WD store had these blasted type drives in stock!!!!This second drive I bought off seller called Marius, I have told him about the warranty issue and he is emigrating and not his problem apparently, do not buy off that seller, I gave him good feedback about delivery etc but his customer service is diabolical.Week or so later, thankfully Western Digital have extended the warranty, all the seller has done is let rip into me that he sold me a drive with none of the warranty as advertised, how dare I contact him about it! the drive works fine though so after giving one star after receiving a fake drive or a drive where the details do not add up, to a second drive that had little warranty I will now up the stars although this whole process with the amount of time used I could of bought a brand new pc with a much better, larger drive in it, for much less!!!!

A fine drive. I've put it inside a caddie that I had going spare and am using it as an external music drive. This drive is obviously old stock as no one has made IDE drives for some years but it's unused and passed all the tests I could throw at it. All in all, it is extremely good value. If you have a PC that uses IDE drives I would suggest you buy one or two and put them aside as back up drives. I can't imagine that they will be available for that much longer.

I fitted this to an old Pentium 4 PC that had a tiny 50GB drive. Worked OK. But the controller card went faulty (most likely due to a new memory card :-( So it now won't allow to be made bootable properly, windows installation goes OK but then the PC will not boot (I had fitted it another PC), the PC boots OK with another HDD. OK but not as robust as many would make WD out to be ! Hitachi and Seagate drives that I have keep going and going. I bought the drive in Aug 2010.

Two of my PC desktop computers, about 7 years old, recently developed starting and freezing problems with their 80G hard drives. I have now bought two of these Western Digitals to replace them and so far am delighted with their performance and quiet running. Initialising and formatting them before use was easy and trouble-free.Note I bought this Caviar because it is equipped for running with the traditional wide PATA information cable. Not long ago Hard Drives of this sort of storage capacity were much more expensive, so this represents great value for money.

WD Caviar blue - I ordered this drive for a replacement for my CCTV system as original had failed, I had tried some Htachi drives but these were too noisyDelivered early, I was a little apprehensive initially as the drive wasn't a WD 250GB caviar blue as I was expecting but a WD caviar SE. Needn't have worried - performs just as well as the original - virtually silent.

New hard disk for my 6 year old Notebook as the original just did not provide sufficient space for all my photo's etc.Installed 8 months ago and is working fine, no problems. The higher spin speed (7200 vs 5600) and the larger onboard cache (8MB vs 4MB) have between them speeded up Windows nicely as a by-product. Windows was taking about 6 mins to startup and is now taking about 2 mins - big improvement.

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This product was delivered before the atated time and was a brand new product, unfortunately the connecting sockets were different to the the original which this item was supposed to replace. So unit was returned and a prompt no fuss refund was made. So I can endorse a good supplier who not only supplied on time but was very quick in a no quibble refund.