Boot to desktop went from 30 sec, to 25 sec with this HD. Programs open faster. The 4 I got had less then 15,000 hours, although I would be fine with less then 30K. I've seen them with over 80,000 hours. For comparison, I would never buy a Caviar Blue with 30,000 hours. If low air flow, or small computer, consider getting with the ice pack (3.5 inch).
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
The drive itself despite the 2008/2009 meets almost to modern performance. I was getting routinely 87-100MB/s off the drive which means it's pretty fast. Even for an 80GB it excels at the older age of the drive. Running 2 of them in tandem on a RAID-0 allows me to hit close to 170-202MB/s using ATTO Benchmark on an nVidia RAID. I plan to use 4 of these in RAID-0 (Striped) for doing Virtual machines (Not worried about redunancy, I run a 2TB RAID-10 Server with 3Ware controller with BBU Cache for backup). As far as space, it should be plenty for boot drive and is very quick. It's no Solid-State but it gives even some modern drives a run for their money (Especially green drives) with the performance. The drives themselves are very quiet. Almost unnoticeable in a drive case when I was testing them. They are solid performers and don't let the ice pack fool you. Being 2.5" they run quite cool. After running them for 2 hours with no air, putting your hand on the drive was barely slightly warm to the touch. I would review all Velociraptors as a very good value for storage/speed, if you need more space than an SSD. That said, a simple SSD (60GB or so like in my tower) will outperform these and even current Raptors, but if you are looking for solid performance and space, the Western Digital Velociraptor series will not disappoint.Read full review
for a mechanical hard drive,this is a impressive value.put enough in a raid 0 configuration and you approach the speeds and sustained reads that of a solid state drive.it is very close to a good single solid state drive in a raid of 2 or more. if you want a fast and very responsive computer on the cheap this is the way to go. if you run WD data lifeguard tools to test the drive it may or may not throw a code 0229,don't be concerned of this code as even new drives do this and if you go to the trouble codes on the western digital site this code is not even listed.just format and install or set up a raid array,striped or spanned. the drives I received were of 2008 or 2009 vintage and they theoretically have a lot of life left in them and they are also much quieter in operation than my 7200 rpm drives.Read full review
A great drive that performs about as well as you could expect from any conventional spindle. Solid state drives are taking over, but having a reliable, traditional platter for bulk data storage will still be the dominant paradigm for a few more years. Performance testing is part of my job, and for the benchmark "rotating rust" based tests I run, this is my flagship go-to unit. It's not too noisy for a desktop rig, and the cooling-pack that the 2.5" drive is mounted in makes it convenient to install into traditional 3.5" drive bays. If you need terabytes of disk storage, go get a 5400RPM drive for power-savings and capacity, but if you only need a few tens of gigabytes or so for "hot" data (or for swap or frequently written-to data) this is a great solution. Consider solid state for your boot drive if you're seeking to enhance bootup and system performance.Read full review
I purchased a number of these specifically for the Icepack dock the HDD is installed in. Place an SSD drive in the IcePack and you never need to worry about head load of the SSD. Lets face it in todays world an 80GB drive is for the most part useless.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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