WD Blue 500GB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 16MB Cache 3.5 Inch - 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 drives just in case these new ones have any issues I won't have to rebuild the system drives from scratch.I know that the motherboards in my machines cannot make use of the 6Gb throughput, however, these drives are definitely faster than what they're replacing - older WD drives which indicate they are 7200RPM and 3Gb. Specs on the older drives indicate performance shouldn't be all that different, but it is, and for the better. I won't question it.The drive indicates you can jumper pins 5 and 6 to limit it to 3Gb, but I didn't understand the benefit of doing it, so I left it unjumpered and it's working well.To summarize - these drives are fast, quiet, and so far are performing excellently. I'm very happy with them thus far.

I love Disk drives SATA for storage. I love ssd for OS much faster. The photo above shows how long my hard drives been on for 1 is over 13 years old the other 2 about a year. No telling how long a disk drive will last if anyone says they can tell you they are lying. I took out my older one and replaced it because the hard drive i took out was causing long boots and slowing down searches on PC but it is still loaded with things I can still use if I want it is far from dead It is a tad newer than the 13 year old. I only buy them when they are cheap and on sale because no matter the review you could get a bad one ..in my case been lucky so far. I grabbed the 2 Blue western Digitals as back up so no telling how long they will last. No One can tell me that. Hopefully my next motherboard board will handle 2 ssd and 4 SATA...

We have a Windows XP PC with 250GB hard drive that was getting full with photos and videos. We therefore ordered this inexpensive upgrade to triple the capacity to 750GB total. We ordered the same Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive as the original since our old drive has been quite reliable over the past 4 years. [Western Digital also makes Green drives that are cooler and quieter, but supposedly not so reliable; and Black drives for gaming performance that we didn't need.] The new 500GB hard drive, as stated, is "bare". That means 2 cables are needed along with it - a data cable, and a power cable. We found this out by contacting Western Digital Tech Support who were quite helpful. We ordered these cables from amazon.com as well: B0001Y8UI4, and B00009YFTI. The ambition was to do this at home; but realized upon opening the PC box that it wasn't so easy - the connections were not easy to figure out including jumper to lower the speed of the new drive from 6Gb/s to 3Gb/s - that Western Digital had warned us about to be compatible with the older PC. Fortunately, a local computer repair shop agreed to do it for only $50 [the same components purchased from them would have been twice as much as amazon.com!] as opposed to Best Buy Geek Squad that wanted over $200 for the same labor. Now, the programs are on the old hard drive [C:] and the data is on this new drive [E:]. The hardware is not a problem; it is working fine as it should. The problem is with software handling the transition of the data. The document folders were an easy fix - change designation from C: to E: for each user. But some programs have been a pain: For example, iTunes had to be directed to E: drive and in the process of rebuilding its library, duplicated all files and also lost the playlists. It is now a headache to manually fix 200GB of iTunes library data since, as we all have experienced, there is no support when it comes to software [Help forums haven't responded]. But I believe we are good to go for another few years after this.

I've already had a Western Digital (500 GB) HDD installed in my PC (well it wasn't the same model but the same brand and capacity)All I can say is the item is very good from a very good company.Now between the 2 Hard drives in my desktop I have 1TB of space.Western Digital is a very good brand and if you were to say go to Staples to buy this Hard drive I doubt you would pay less than $70 for it.The hard drive is fast (for the price) and reliable.Also even if you've never installed a hard drive in your PC before it isn't rocket science and it is well worth it.So i would recommend this to anyone who's running out of space and who's other hard drive is about to croak.Overall I am very satisfied with this product and the price (i paid only $37 i believe) , the price is outstanding!5 years ago this would've cost you $400 or more.Anyway like I said ,if you have ANY doubts about getting this item - DON'T!You will not be disappointed ! ! !