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These are top of the Western Digital line, designed for servers running Raid arrays. They carry a 5 year warranty from the date of manufacture. I purchased 2 of these for a NAS box running in Raid 1. They are a bit noisier and run a few degrees hotter (42-46c at idle) than the average desktop drive in a well ventilated enclosure. I would have rated this purchase higher, but 1 of the drives failed, shortly after installation. When you receive the drives go to Western Digital's web site and check your serial numbers. It's easy to do and it will tell you if it has been registered and if it's still in warranty. Assuming the unit is not registered to someone else and it is still in warranty WD will replace the failed drive. Just carefully follow to instructions. The turn around for me was about 10 days, but I didn't opt for a cross ship. If you check the warranty status of the new drive you will find it to be the same as the old one. The drives have been up and running for a little over 2 months now with no problems and I am happy with the purchase.Read full review
Fast 7200 rpm, high quality, Used in raid arrays and servers. Enterprise-grade. When they are bought used, you can get them in bulk which is ideal for backing up lots of data. However, they do normally run much hotter than the 5400 rpm drives and are noisier but with a good fan in your case, there are no worries.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Although this drive is recommended all over, the WD Blacks are not a "one size fits all" solution. First, it's far louder than a WD Blue, which might confuse people that the drive went bad. The whirring is normal, and you'll hear it every time the drive accesses a file, so if you can don't make this your primary drive unless you're ready for the sound. This is notable enough to not recommend this drive to audio engineers, or online entertainers such as podcasters & LPers, nor have this drive inside your bedroom/media PC. Secondly, the drive speeds are a bit exaggerated - it won't make your old Windows partition faster by transfer. Newly partitioned, the speeds are around 131 mb/s, but the max my MBR Windows 7 partition got after defragging was 10 mb/s. Firefox will still hang despite the drive's capabilities. All in all, this drive is not for gamers nor casual hobbyists, but for serious enthusiasts (and those who get insane deals like me - still worth it for $40) who can tolerate the sound and need this as a scratch disk/active file storage. For people looking to make entertainment rigs, I'd recommend a lower-class HDD like the WD Blue, or WD Red for being constantly on. For people who need work done, make the jump to the SSD+Backup combo. If you don't fit either category, then you can handle this drive.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Not sure about reliable. There should be a maybe or don't know choice there. This drive seems to have a minor problem. It seems to enter a self test mode where it thrashes very loud and hard every 10 seconds or so and then stops that behavior for a little while. The S.M.A.R.T. report shows nothing out of sorts but it is still running some sort of test offline. Very annoying at night when trying to sleep. my room mate complains and it worries me. I may just go back to my old drive. The only work around I have is to set it to some task like smartctl -t long to keep it busy. I noticed that long test has taken as long as 5 days to complete but it's only suppsed to take 29 hours to finish that test. So I think something is wrong but SMART can't quite see it. As long as it has a job to do it won't make that noise. Note the smartctl test does not produce that same noise so I don't know what it is that the drive feels it needs to be doing but it never satisfies it self. It's a shame in all other ways the drive seems fine but that noise is loud when it has a bad day. Loud and worrisome.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
I consider the WD RE3 and RE4 drives to be one of the gold standards for disk drives. These were designed to go into servers, so their reliability and lifetime is better than consumer-grade drives. They are also not shingled recording, which I/M/O greatly improves both speed and data reliability. The only drawback is that WD doesn't make them any more and they're only available used. Used drives are always something of a crapshoot, so if you buy them used the first thing you must do is run the WD full diagnostic, then do a full erase, then a full surface test, and then format with bad block detection enabled. It takes two days but at the end you can expect the drive to last a long time without problems.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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