Western Digital 2TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EZAZ

Still working 3 years after purchase. Western Digital is solid.

Product arrived in excellent condition from ALL4COMPUTERS. I use these mega TB Western Digital drives for backups, video and photo storage and emergency work. ALL4 was also very responsive in providing some after purchase information about installation. I'll definitely buy from them here again.

Got this to replace my WD Caviar Green 1.5TB drive, which is 6 years old, mostly in continuous (24 hr/d) use in that time and starting to show some early wear indications on disk health programs (no failures indicated though). I've tried several brands of hard drives over the last 30 years, and have found Western Digital drives to be the most reliable for me. I chose the WD Blue 3 TB 5400 rpm drive because it was WD (i.e., reliability, ease of use, support, etc., all the things WD is known for), provides excellent capacity and performance for the price, and would be quiet and low power. My current desktop build is nearly absolutely silent (which is what I was shooting for when I spec'd out the components) and I wanted to keep it that way. The power and noise levels for the 5400 rpm Blue were much better than alternative 7200 rpm drives. The file operations were already about 50% faster than my existing Caviar Green unit (6GB/s vs. 3). Since I use the drive in a Maxell "hyper-duo" hybrid configuration paired with an Adata 60GB SSD (my Asus mother board has that feature built in) I was not too concerned about speed of file operations. I have all of my programs and the most frequently accessed data files on a 250 GB SSD, I just want the hard drive for media files (pictures, videos, music) and less accessed other data. This drive is very quiet and so far is performing well.

No idea how long it's been since I bought this, but it's still working great and storing files to this day.

I trust WD for my storage needs. I haven't had an issue with them, and if I did which was only once several years ago their warranty coverage took care of my and they sent me out another replacement drive. They're upkeep times and failure rates are some of the best in the industry. I usually use an SSD or NVM.e drive for my OS and other vital apps, and install the rest of my apps, games, and media on this drive. You can't go wrong with WD platter hard drives. SSD chips fail after a certain number of reads/writes so I make sure to always have a WD platter drive to store my data. Make sure to do multiple backups and store vital files to the cloud if necessary.

Good to use

What I'm about to tell you will potentially save you from future catastrophic failures including loss of data. Nothing beats having multiple good backup copies.; however, the following information will instruct you on how to test your new drive to make sure it's free from defects. Imagine, you have a spinning disk rotating thousands of times per minute separated by its recording/reading head by less thickness of a human hair. Just one wrong thing and .. "click..click..click". You don't want that. Generally speaking a bad hard drive will make itself known sooner vs later when it's tested fully. Not always. What YOU can do is put the hard drive through its paces to really give it a good solid work out and make sure every space designated by the drive as available/writeable space, is in fact GOOD. Its magnetic/electrical properties strong. This test is a LONG test. What it does is write all 01010101s,10101010s,11111111s,and 00000000s, binary, to the disk.--filling it. It does this in 4 passes (i.e. writes the disk fully) 4 times. After each write it will read what was just written beginning to end to ensure all bits were written exactly right. If they wern't, the drive's detection mechanism for errors (SMART) will notice (i.e. a bit was not written to a sector correctly) and flag the SMART COUNTER. For example, uncorrectable or reallocated sector count would show a non-0 value. During operation, if the drive encounters a fault with a sector it will swap that sector with another known good sector the drive has in reserve and will log it via SMART. A PERFECTLY WORKING HARD DRIVE WILL SHOW '0' for 'Reallocated Sector Count','Reported Uncorrectable Errors','Current Pending Sector Count','Uncorrectable Sector Count'.IF ANY OF THESE VALUES SHOWS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A 0 (zero), THEN YOU HAVE A FAILING HDD AND SHOULD REPLACE IT ASAP. DO NOT TRUST YOUR DATA ON IT. This command will erase everything on the disk if there is data already on there when you run this test. For this 2TB it would have taken about 30 hours, but I stopped it at the start of the final pass since I was confident--4 passes are better but do at least 2. But I am confident the data will be safe because it worked out the drive hard and pictures above show good numbers. Boot up your computer using a linux distribution boot usb/cd. Debian Ubuntu, any one will do--it doesn't matter. In a terminal type: sudo fdisk -l *Identiy which /dev is your HDD you wish to test. Also note if it says 512 or 4096 where it says "Sector size (logical/physical)". For example, if it's /dev/sde and says 4096 Sector Size (such as this 2tb drive) then type the following command: sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 -c 131072 /dev/sde This will 0101,1010,1111,and 0000 write and read/verify the drive back-to-back in 4 passes. On my slow computer this took around 24-30 hours to complete or 2tb. The ' -b ' option is the Block Size. This should match the drive. 512 or 4096. The '-c' option tells badblocks how many blocks to test at time. Changing this number will alter the speed and will either make the process go along faster or slower (dependant on Drive Interface, Ram/Cpu speed, etc.). Instead of '-c 131072' ,try '-c 65536 if it seems the test is taking too long to increment the %'s. In fact try it with '-c 65536' option. Let it run or 30 sec then CTRL-C to cancel it. Then run the command again but with '-c 131072' instead. Run it for 30 sec then CTRL-C to cancel. Compare the 2 and whichever command that had the higher % when you CTRL-C'd would be the number you would choose since that one ran a little bit faster. Google or man page 'badblocks' for more information. Whenever you buy a new hard drive get into the mindset/habit that you will NOT use them for awhile because you have to test them out first. Trust me on this and it's totally worth it. I'd like to think I avoid catastrophic failures because I did this test and it would have presented itself (or at least more likelihood) then vs months/years down the road. That's not a given--any drive can fail anytime or any reason but this is just an additional layer. Like a "shakedown cruise' if you will. Regarding this drive: Western Digital 2TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache,, I can say that I am pleased it tested clean and I look forward to using this drive.And I'm confident it will keep my data intact. You are welcome!

Always nice to just have a big ass hard drive to store music, movies, stuff for mods, etc.