Western Digital 1TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD10EZEX

I put this into an external SATA, 4 bay, USB3 drive docking station, that I have been using for many years to offload and backup files from my desktop PC on a Windows OS. My current OS is Win11 Pro 22H2, and the installation was very easy. You will likely need to call up the Win disk manager to initialize and format this drive. Im happy :)

Cost to byte ratio is great. Installed and formatted easily. Didnt come with a sata cable. Both my last blue WDs lasted 12 years.

I had recently purchased an external hard drive case that is usb 3.0 and I used an old Seagate 1TB Barracuda I had laying around to expand my sons hard drive on his xbox one. Unfortunately the old seagate didnt stand a chance...It worked for a few weeks and then I got the dreaded TICK TICK TICK noise...hard drive platter was ruined...Not sure what happened. Anyway, I already had the 3.0 enclosure with fan so I opted to get another bare hard drive to install in there. I have always had Seagates and to be honest this is the first that has failed me. But it is indeed 8 years old. I installed the new WD in the enclosure in less than 2 minutes and plugged it in. I formatted it for xbox one and installed his games there. We played a few games and everything works like a charm. With the 6GB transfer rate I dont think its going to be an issue. Granted this is day one. I write a ton of reviews so I will be back to let you know if there is any changes in the hard drive. PRICE: For what I have invested in the hard drive and the fan cooled enclosure it is still cheaper than buying an external hard drive. Not by much as they are getting cheaper, but some. INCLUDED: You should know all you are getting is the hard drive..There is nothing else in the box. No instructions or cables or plugs or whatever you need to use for your project. This can be installed in a desktop PC that takes a 3.5 hard drive or a 3.5 hard drive enclosure. If you are unsure on how to install this please google it..Remember you live in a video era and you have unlimited knowledge at your fingertips. EASE OF USE: Simple PLug and Play ...You will need to format it for the xbox one. Put it in a 3.5 USB 3.0 enclosure and plug it in. Then follow the onscreen prompts. Its as easy as clicking a button. Like I said before I have always been a Seagate fan because that is the first brand I got 8 years ago and it lasted this long. This is the first WD I have had so I am keeping my fingers crossed on this one. I do hope this review helps someone out there. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. If you found my review helpful, let me know. Lets keep making better buying decisions together. Thank you for reading and as always Be Safe & Happy Shopping!!

The first one I received was dead on arrival exchange for another one. it was easy to install and works great. I love the extra space for my data files

Si se requiere de un disco duro HDD para almacenar grandes cosas, este disco es muy bueno, buena marca y funciona muy bien, hay que tener claro que no se iguala a un SDD pero para iniciar, será una buena decisión además que trae una cantidad de espacio suficiente para una persona del común.

This drive, this particular one, performs beyond typical specs in a variety of tests so for value/performance it has been a great purchase. Having been involved in both large & small quantity purchases since the pc level hard drives first arrived I can only say they have been a commodity item for at least 2 decades. The terabyte size drives have matured as we are moving into the newer realm of the multi-gigabyte drives 3, 4GB & higher at the consumer level. All the major manufacturers tend to provide excellent products as do some of the very small providers. The only problem that may come up with the smaller provider might be the sale of high capacity drives at bargain basement prices because they did not really meet the specifications of the original manufacturer. In that case reliability could be a real issue but you may get lucky and get one that stands out from the crowd & works really well. At those prices it becomes the luck of the draw. Also, to be fair, a major manufacturer can just have a bad hair day only to find a group made it out the doer that just dont really measure up. They often dont find this out until the drives start coming back having failed. Overall the chances of a defective drive made by one of the major manufacturers is just much smaller than one provided by one of the smaller companies. I, personally, use WD Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Maxtor, etc. and can say they all have had their good, and bad, days but overwhelmingly good days. Just really remember that heat kills so keep your drives as cool as you can, make sure your fans are working & the airflow is not restricted. Dont allow dust to build up as it insulates the drives & keeps the heat in creating a very unhappy drive. Generally if the drive is to hot to keep your fingers on it find a way to cool it down as it will fail much sooner at that heat level. If you have access to some of the software that will let you know the running temperature, of the newer drives, I use CrystalDiskInfoPortable which is free as one of the many free software packages found on www.PortableApps.com. While not a professional package it does let me know how hot my drives are running so I will know if trouble may be on the way. It also provides a great deal of additional information if you want more data to review. All the software on PortableApps is legally free & is part of the Open Software system so enjoy &, if you want, pass the word around. I hope Amazon doesnt get to upset over the posting of their web site but it is free & I have no interest beyond helping others with its posting.

it work

I gave this drive to someone as a gift, and theyve been using it for backups for 10 months without issue. My review is based on another unit of this drive which I bought for myself some months later. Ive been using it as my primary desktop OS/programs drive since 5/29/2014, so its about 5 months now. There have been no problems thus far. Its really quite a bargain for desktop use if 1TB is all you need. The actual capacity of this drive is 931.5GB. Thats an old marketing trick which can be blamed for the pointless redefinition of all our real, long established data measurements with those silly i characters. I wont dwell on it any further, but 931GB is the true capacity when measured in base 2, as all data is correctly measured. This 1TB Blue drive uses a single 1TB platter spinning at 7200rpm. There are 2 heads (each side is 500GB). A single platter design is usually better for reliability than having multiple smaller platters, because there are fewer points of failure, the assembly is lighter, the motor doesnt have to work as hard, and less heat is generated. Single platter drives will also tend to be quieter, but due to my configuration I cant judge the noise level. There has been much discussion and testing among users in online forums, including WDs forum, which repeatedly show that the 1TB Blue and 1TB Black perform the same. It appears the only benefit of the 1TB Black is a longer warranty. Some Blacks are faster than this drive, but the 1TB model is not. Compared to a Green, the Blue is faster owing to its faster rotation speed. The Green drives also have an intellipark feature which causes them to keep parking the heads after a few seconds of inactivity. This can cause laggy response and extra wear. I dislike that design - I believe power management functions should be left under the control of the operating system, which can account for user preferences and what is happening in the rest of the system. Hardcoding this behavior into the drive is ridiculous, in my opinion. The Blue behaves the way I prefer - it does not use intellipark, it stays ready to roll until directed otherwise through power management commands from the OS. I wish they were making the Blue series in larger sizes - it seems this 1TB is the end of the line. I dont care for the Greens and the Blacks are more expensive. Partition/Sector Alignment -------------------------------- Please be aware that like most modern drives, this drive uses 4KB sectors (also known as advanced format). If you are using Windows 2003, Windows XP or older, as I am, dont let Windows handle the partitioning of this drive. This is even an issue on unpatched versions of Vista and Windows 7. These older versions of Windows will believe that the physical sectors are 512 bytes, when in reality they are 4KB. As a result, the partition(s) will not be aligned with the physical sectors. It will still work, but performance will be reduced. Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP and older do not have any update to fix this, but its not a problem as long as you do the partitioning with a suitable 3rd party utility. I think Western Digital offers a tool for this, but Ive never tried it. Once the partitions are set, its fine to let Windows format them. For my Windows XP install, I used a recent version of GParted to partition the drive. GParted can be downloaded and burned to a bootable CD, or installed to a USB flash drive. Just use the option to align your partition(s) on 1MB boundaries. This is the easy way to ensure they are aligned correctly for the best performance. Then boot your WinXP install disc and let it format the partition that you already created. It sounds harder than it is, its a minor hassle but its simple. If you ever change the partitions, once again use GParted or a similar utility that handles alignment for modern hard disks. Dont use the built-in XP partitioning. But again, once the partitions are created, its fine to let Windows format them. The built-in partitioning is fixed in Windows 8. According to Microsoft, it is fixed in Windows 7 after installing Service Pack 1 - you would need to have that service pack before partitioning the drive, not after. Again according to Microsoft, it is also fixed in Windows Vista *after* installing update MS KB 2553708 - I assume this is automatically installed for people who use automatic updates, but I dont know that for a fact. This wont do you any good if youre doing a fresh install and your install disc predates the required update. The partition alignment detail Ive described above is an issue you will encounter with any recent hard drive, its not unique to this model. If you ignore it, performance will be affected but it will still work. You may see Seagate drives implying that they are immune from this, but in reality, they are not. All modern advanced format drives, of any brand, will perform better if sectors are properly aligned. But its not a big deal - just use a modern partitioning utility and then youre set. ---------------------- I just tested this drive using Roadkils Disk Speed on Windows XP 32-bit. Ill cut out all the variables and just give the linear transfer results with large block sizes. My drive has a few partitions and there are lots of files on it, so this might affect results. First partition (first 20GB): 170-178MB/sec linear read 3rd partition (physical location range is from 28-628GB): 153-177MB/sec linear read Last 300GB is unpartitioned so I cant test that range. I dont think the random access test is useful, because my partitioning greatly influences the result. Theres a test mode for the whole physical disk, but its results are too inconsistent. This drive is a great bargain if you just need a simple, inexpensive, well performing 7200rpm hard disk. I was tempted to try a Seagate SSHD, but I couldnt justify the cost compared to this. If I was shopping today, Id look carefully at the HGST and Toshiba offerings as well, but from the WD side this is my pick for a general purpose 1TB desktop drive. Update: It is now 11/2015. This drive is in my desktop PC, used daily, and still works fine. Some months ago I ran a benchmark on this drive using the linux utility gnome-disks. The random access performance measured out to a 15.7ms average. This is mediocre, but expected from a quiet drive. Screenshot is attached. It also shows the transfer rate across the disk (read test only, I didnt test writes).

The HDD arrived with no problems. Good amount of space for the money.