Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD5000AAKX

My use for these drives is to replace a couple of aging five year old 80GB drives in Windows XP and XP Media Center machines. Those drives are still running fine, however, for the price, I had absolutely no reason not to upgrade them at this time.

I came across this drive middle of last week and Amazon was selling it new for $29 - I was scratching my head thinking "what's the deal" and "what's wrong with these drives"? Sure, even though they were above $25, Amazon was still charging for the shipping - so I took two to bring the per drive shipping down slightly. The old 3Gb version of this drive was selling for over $40 - so again, scratching my head about this. Maybe it was a pricing mistake? Whatever - it was a great price.

The drives arrived yesterday, same standard OEM packaging all of my six other WD drives have come in over the past 9 months. I used Clonezilla to clone the old drives on to the new, it went smoothly without any issues. I'm storing the old... Read more

I purchased the Western Digital 1 Tb Sata 6.0 Gb-s 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare-oem Drive WD10EALX from Midwest Memory Outlet through Amazon. The drive was received within 3 or 4 days and was packaged extremely well. My original Seagate drive from my HP m9550F failed and was replace by the WD. The Seagate was the drive that HP kept shipping after a drive bios error was long known about. Information from the internet showed that lots of people lost valuable data because HP just kept shipping a drive with a known problem. Anyhow, I did get a bios update for the Seagate before it failed but it ended up failing anyhow.

The WD10EALX drive is fairly loud. I still have the drive located outside the case so that may contribute to the sound level. The noise seems to be from the head movement. The platter spin is silent. For the price this is one drive that is hard to beat and I am well pleased with it. My bios can't take advantage of the 6 Gb/s transfer rate but the drive is... Read more

It's a bare hard drive that arrived quickly from Amazon and well-packaged. I replaced a 500GB WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS with this WD Caviar Blue WD10EALX as the primary drive in an HP i7 desktop. This drive and the old WD drive show basically identical CrystalMark results, but it does seem to load programs and boot faster (I restored an image of the old installation to the new disk, so everything else is the same). CrystalMark shows that it outperforms the Green series drives I own by 20-30%.

I was looking at the WD Caviar Black drives, and saw some reviews that said they are loud, so I went for this one, which is advertised as quieter and cooler than the Black series and insignificantly slower than a Black. I don't have a Black series to compare to, but the WD10EALX is definitely louder than the 500GB Blue version, and also louder than 1TB and 2TB WD Green drives that I own. It's not LOUD, but it is louder than those other drives. It has the normal disk seek sound which is... Read more