WD Caviar SE 80GB Hard Drive - OEM

my first and last WD

Posted Sep 28, 2005 - The drive was OEM and has just died after two years of normal usage (no video editing or game playing). The motherboard recognizes it but nothing can read or write on it, including FDISK - total disk boot failure. Before that Partition Magic was refusing to partition it since it found too many errors on the drive. The drive had this high pitched spindle noise that was louder than my cooling fans and was making the machine pretty noisy. The replacement I got from WD still has the same spindle noise right from the begining. If your system is noisy anyways it will be masked and you won't hear it DUH! I installed a 160GB Seagate Baracuda instead that doesn't have spindle noise (yet). To be fair I could hardly hear the WD seek/write on disk while I can hear very well the Baracuda but that is only when it writes something big on disk, most of the time I don't hear it all. Finally, my system is almost noise free except the very soft humming from the fans which is unavoidable.

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It crapped on me again!

Posted Dec 20, 2005 - I first bought this drive in 2003. Not even a year later and it went bad on me and I lost a lot of stuff. It was under warranty, so I sent it back to Western Digital for a new one. Here I am two years later and guess what happened today? Yep, it died on me again. Thankfully I had most of the stuff backed up, but still lost some video files I was working on that were too big to back up. It's still under warranty, so I'll send it back for a new one, but I'm immediately putting that drive on eBay. My old 30GB IBM hard drive that I originally got with a desktop 7 years ago is still my main, and most reliable, hard drive. Stick with them, Maxtor (which I also own), or Seagate (excellent 5 year warranty on their drives). Avoid Western Digital!

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I have built &/or supported hundreds of systems wi ...

Posted Jul 20, 2004 - I have built &/or supported hundreds of systems with drives from WD, Maxtor, IBM & Seagate and upgraded 1000+ with Fujitsu. They had the low bid. I have experienced good reliability with all of them, although Fujitsu's failure rate was about 2 or 3 times the norm of about 0.5%. As for speed, in this class, IBM & WD are at the top, but IBM matches WD with only 2MB cache. That means that it's a toss-up if you are looking for a primary drive for Windows, applications or a database, where WD's 8mb cache can keep up with IBM (now Hitachi). But if you are looking for a drive to store large video or backup files of 10MB-30GB, then IBM wins hands down, because the cache is useless and IBM seeks and streams data faster. +++ Note: As for the issue of size, just read the fine print on any retail box or system advertisement and they will tell you that they are measuring in decimal gigabytes=1,000,000,000 bytes. Windows or any other OS refers to the total drive size in binary gigabytes=1024*1024*1024=1,073,741,824 bytes. You don't get this information when you buy an OEM (bare) drive because they assume that OEMs already know this. This has nothing to do with NTFS vs FAT16 or 32, master boot records or "file structure". Apparently, 2 years of working in tech support is not enough to learn this and one shouldn't call others ignorant, based upon one's own lack of knowledge. My 1 year in tech support was at the beginning of a career that has continued for 15 more years. The only comment that was accurate is that over 89% of users don't RTFM!

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I bought a rebuilt Presario about four months ago, ...

Posted Jan 28, 2005 - I bought a rebuilt Presario about four months ago, which had only a 1 GB hard drive. I have never owned a computer before but quickly learned just how limiting such a small drive can be. I bought this drive, spent several days at Western Digital's comprehensive support pages learning all I could, and with the help of Data Lifeguard Tools (which I downloaded from the site), installed the bare drive and copied all data from the old one in under three hours with no problems at all. (Much of that time was actually spent clearing work space on my desk, and removing-replacing the casing of the computer.) Thanks to the inexhaustable supply of information I found at WD's site, I didn't even feel a qualm when I discovered that the ribbon cable connecting the old drive did not have a center (third) 40-pin connector. I temporarily disconnected the CD ROM drive, and used it's 40 pin cable to connect the new drive to the motherboard until the drive copy was complete and I was ready to remove the old hard drive. It was a wonderful feeling to disconnect the old drive, reset the jumpers, reboot with my new 80 GB drive, and find everything had worked out perfectly. And the WD Caviar runs silently in my system, unlike the old drive which sounded like it was full of walnut shells. I have no reservations about recommending Western Digital, and specifically the WD800JB, to anyone looking for a new drive. Data Lifeguard Tools and the Western Digital site's information made this process very nearly painless (the scraped knuckle stung a little bit, but that was hardly their fault!)

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I am very skeptical this hard drive has received s ...

Posted Mar 12, 2004 - I am very skeptical this hard drive has received such glowing reveiws. This is my second review. They didnt bother to post my original. At other review sites there are tons of complaints. This drive is noisey. My unit not only makes a loud whine but now it has started a annoying rattle.(Yes, its been installed corectly!!) I bought this drive at Officemax for 19.99 after rebates. Even if I got it for free it would be to much for such a piece of ####!!

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This is one of the most quiet EIDE hard drives I e ...

Posted Dec 31, 2002 - This is one of the most quiet EIDE hard drives I ever see. It has 8Mb buffer which makes this hard drive to run faster than the others.

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This drive is great in XP but even better on 2000P ...

Posted Mar 25, 2004 - This drive is great in XP but even better on 2000Pro, simply the XP shell will bog down anything. I use this drive to back up another earlier WD 80GB drive. I run Diskkeeper 8, both workstation and server on the drive and this drive takes 10 minutes to defrag compared to the other drive with a 2MB buffer same size, both at near full capacity. I've worked in the the IT field for 10 years, and these drives are amazing. Will try an SATA when my new MOBO arrives. ***Note: For those that see this drive as a 74.5GB after a format, thats the way it is supposed to be. All drives format as such and so on. Hence the NTFS, or FAT format. It's called a master boot record, and boot sector. Which is the 1st 1,000,000 Sectors of a drive. This is how drives format, if you complain about it, you only prove your IGNORANCE. Anything that formats will lose some size to file structure, it's a must, Format a CD-RW and see how much of 700MB is left after the format for the creation of a CDFS file structure. Same with an MP3 player or flash card, etc. I worked in Tech Support for 2 years, for end users. 89% of all Americans don't read the manuals to any products they purchase.

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This drive will set the standard for EIDE HDD for ...

Posted Aug 15, 2002 - This drive will set the standard for EIDE HDD for the near future. The 8 MB buffer is a clear improvement over others in this class with only 2 MB. The street price was stated as $160 on 6/20/02. Today 8/15/02 the street price is just UNDER $100 from a distributor. This combination makes this THE EIDE to buy.

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Got this hard drive as a replacement after my stoc ...

Posted Jul 12, 2003 - Got this hard drive as a replacement after my stock one went bellyup. Installation was an absolute breeze. The drive is fast!!!!!!! Runs very quietly and has not had any negative impact on CPU temps. Only glitch I ran into was to make sure that when installing that people look at the jumper settings on the drive itself---because the ones in the installation manual were way off. But this is definitely a deal that is hard to beat for the price, and with a 3 year warranty it should outlast most computers before they need to be replaced.

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Put two of these together in raid 0, &, you might ...

Posted Dec 31, 2003 - Put two of these together in raid 0, &, you might stop pricing those SATA drives you've been drooling over. I have been using an ATI all in wonder video card as a PVR. The sorage capacity of these drives + speed takes off 33% of the time I spend encoding video over 2 WD400BB drives in the same arrangement.

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So far I love this drive. Even though it's 80G it ...

Posted Aug 10, 2002 - So far I love this drive. Even though it's 80G it takes no time at all to access files. Installation was simple after I downloaded software from Western digital, but before that windows wouldn't recognize it. Over all a very good drive.

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I am very happy with this hard drive, don't get me ...

Posted May 3, 2004 - I am very happy with this hard drive, don't get me wrong. It operates very quietly and it has some faster access times even though I might not use them. At the time I got the drive it was a very good price and I am glad I was able to get the 3 year warranty. Believe me, the warranty is a piece of mind because I have had hard drives go out after a year and a half and they are quickly replaced. But... my hard drive is only 74.5 GB!! In my book that is not big enough to even be considered a 75 GB hard drive. I don't see how they can label a drive 80 GB when it is 5.5 GB less than that! I wish they could get it closer, or label it correctly. The drive is 80,000,000,000 bytes and some change, but I don't think that Western Digital knows that 1,000 bytes is not a KB. A KB (kilabyte) is 1,024 bytes. Divide 80,000,000,000 by 1,024 three times and you get... 74.5 GB. I bought another one of these because I was happy with my first one. I use them in a RAID 1 on my internal file server and I have not had a problem with them. They are still fast and quiet. I rate Western Digital Drives very highly because out of the 5 I have had only one 40GB break down on me and it was after I had it for over a year and a half. Its replacement (WD 40GB) is working great and is in a RAID 0 with another WD 40GB. Edit: I found a page on the Maxtor website referring to what I am talking about with the wrong drive sizes: Maxtormaxtor.custhelp.com/cg...>

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This hard drive is one of the best ones ive ever o ...

Posted Aug 4, 2003 - This hard drive is one of the best ones ive ever owned and I am very satisfied with the performance. Very easy to install just make shure you use the cable select jumper.

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I am very happy with this super fast and quiet har ...

Posted Dec 26, 2003 - I am very happy with this super fast and quiet hard drive. It has faster access times than my original OEM hard drive. It was a very good price and super fast shipment from ZipZoomfly.com. I bought this because I wanted a back-up for my OEM hard drive. I wish was my OEM hard drive because it is much faster. Thanks PriceGrabber

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This harddrive is very excellent for the price. Th ...

Posted Oct 29, 2003 - This harddrive is very excellent for the price. There are bigger capacities but since I owned an older computer, I thought I'd get this to see how it would work. And it works very well. With my other harddrive, I now have 93 gigs of harddrive space. My original harddrive was a western digital and didn't give me any problems so why would this one? :)

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