Toshiba L200 500GB 5400RPM 2.5" SATA HDWJ105UZSVA (Bulk)

Before buying this hard drive I have owned a Toshiba laptop which I enjoyed for its durability and performance, as an IT geek I did not consider WD Blue drives (previously customers have asked to replace their drives with those, and I wasn't quite happy with the behavior of the sectors by the end of the hdd platter (slow seek, eventually sectors should become uncorrectable)), neither did I consider maxtor drives (too many failed on me), nor samsung (they tend to have controller issues and overheat), however I did consider getting HGST or Toshiba hard drive, but as I did not know how the seller would pack the hard drive I have decided to go with the product delivered by Amazon.As this hard drive serves in my main rig (it is a laptop), before actually putting it in place I have done some extensive testing to ensure that the drive is functioning perfectly that did include surface scan using MHDD, HDAT, low level format using secure erase command + performing extended SMART test and then checking SMART readings. The disk performed well in all of the tests, it did not have any bad sectors and the seek times on the surface were good with just a few sectors exceeding 10ms (no sectors did exceed 50ms) even at the end of the platter, SMART values did not have any anomalies either and read speed actually a bit surprised me, it was more similar to one of 7200RPM drive rather than 5400RPM on the motherboard with SATA2 (and AHCI) support, with average speed during MHDD test being about 90-100mb/s similar to the drive which it replaced (7200RPM, 250gb).

A hard drive is usually a pretty simple affair; you install it, install software, and then forget it's there until it goes wrong. Therefore I'll review it in light of the differences it makes over the old one (which was replaced fully working - this was a voluntary upgrade, elective surgery!). So this is my installation, the advantages it brought, and my initial feelings about the device. Please be aware that I *do* come back and add to reviews, so if this drive went duff a week later, you can bet I will mention it (I can even install my previous 250GB disk and be back online before the irritation has passed).I needed to breathe life into an oldish laptop (8-9 years) that is still reasonably high-spec (dual-core 2.3Ghz, only a modest 3GB DDR3 RAM, and a sad 250GB hard disk). It used to run Vista, now no longer supported, so with software becoming unavailable for Vista - such as Firefox (which has entered end-of-life updates only) its time had come. The machine has been central to much of my work/education/online life in this time, and rather than destroy the contents of the 250GB HDD that was in there, I thought I'd instead simply swap that drive out and install a new larger one in place to recreate my old Vista machine as Windows 7,but with a lot more hard disk real-estate than previously. The upgrade process was painless, undoing four screws, swapping drives, redoing four screws - done. The drive is 100% compatible with the Fujitsu SATA drive it replaced, thanks to standard screw positions and the connector.I'd considered spending twice as much money (today's prices) for an SSD, getting faster responses but only the same capacity. I wanted more capacity more than I wanted snappier response, and the dream ticket of a 1TB SSD was really not worth the outlay, while the older capacity but now on an SSD, was twice the price..I tried installing Vista first, thinking I'd get an option to upgrade in-place rather than install fresh and have to transfer documents and reinstall everything, but that didn't work out - W7 only allowed fresh installations. Both the Vista installation media and the Windows 7 installation media recognised the disk for what it is (1TB, although only about 950GB when the file tables are in place - if you are using NTFS file system that has been Windows standard for a long time).It is very quiet in operation; access speeds, which mean nothing much on paper, have been pretty good. This drive has a larger buffer than the one it replaced (which was 2GB) and, since it is doing essentially the same work regarding disk accesses, "feels" faster despite the seek times being only marginally faster - not enough that I would notice at least.It almost feels like a CPU boost sometimes, at least when data is fetched, things appear a tad faster than before - and 8-9 years of getting used to a particular response does help me to notice when performance gets a lift, even a modest one.Having acres of space does help me to keep more data locally that until now, having to be disciplined with 250GB, I've had to farm out to NAS storage or external USB HDDs. Now that it can live on the machine again there's less extra nonsense to have to carry around quite so much. For my work I have to have a lot of PDF and other documents to hand, as well as captures of news and media broadcasts, and these can really eat up space. It has been in and operating for 3 days so far. I've pretty much forgotten that it is new, but for the fact I'm reviewing it.Toshiba has been making PCs since the year dot and has been manufacturing HDDs for them too (although they are selling their memory business and the HDD manufacture may change hands in the coming year or two) - they know their stuff and have the track record to prove it, when you consider the vast number of installations that are "out there". So the numbers add up in that sense too, I trust the brand (even though this laptop is Samsung (R710)).I can recommend the HDD, certainly on this brief acquaintance. If I've stayed happy with it, you can tell how long that's been the case simply by checking when I wrote this! If a hitch comes up, it will be documented here, possibly in all-caps (!).

Works well, perfectly fine device.

This was the cheapest hard-drive from a well-known brand I could see. I tend to use my laptop for day to day tasks like facebook, blogs, word and university stuff so I didn't need too much space (this represented a downsize from the size originally installed n my laptop) so this worked well as a quick (next day through prime) replacement part to get my laptop back and running after i dropped it and damaged the original hard drive! I was told that hard drives can be a little hit and miss (regardless of brand - as they can be damaged fairly easily in transit as much as anything else), so there is always a chance you'd need to send back for a replacement and try again, but they should be willing to do this without too much fuss. This is several months later and I've not had any issues since.

Ive had a few of these running in RAID 0 in one of my servers for a few weeks now and so far, I'm very impressed with the performance. Of course, they're no where near as fast as an ssd based setup but for what they cost you wouldnt expect that. I've got 4 in RAID 0 so they perform fairly similarly to a single ssd (on a good raid card). But the price for the capacity is a fraction of what you'd pay for a similar sized ssd.If anyone is wondering the server is only running a bunch of VMs that are properly backed up so data loss is a non issue.

Brought to replace the failing HDD in my ageing laptop. Installation is a breeze, and the drive was picked-up with the correct parameters by BIOS first time. As my laptop is getting on, and only has SATA1 / SATA150, I can't really comment on performance - the drive is limited by my laptop. However, I have no complaints, and it runs more quietly than the old drive ever did. Using Acronis TrueImage and the old drive in a USB caddy I already own, I had migrated to this new drive in about an hour, perhaps slighly less. Overall, I'm perfectly happy with the drive and what I paid for it.

Dead On Arrival - SMART failure. Amazon sent a replacement quickly but - Dead On Arrival, SMART failure. I wish I had read the other one-star reviews before ordering - looks like about a 10% failure rate. Lucky me gets two dying drives. What a waste of time and energy.