WD10000LSRTL Western, Disk good, packing bad (no,..
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Disk good, packing bad (no, make that bad/bad)
There IS a reason to buy RETAIL disks, not OEM disks, from Amazon, and that is the shipment’s packing.
Received this disk in a “standard” box (those just fine for BOOKS), with some brown paper wadded in along the SIDES of the disk’s own box. No bubble wrap, no plastic air bubbles, just some paper that did NOT prevent the Western Digital box from moving around, as I noticed when I picked up the box from the porch. Come on, Amazon, these are NOT books, dvd’s, or hand tools… At least you could put enough packing in so the object does not move, let alone putting packing in above and below to REALLY cushion the hardware.
I’ll note that the Amazon box was crushed in on 1 end a good inch, no doubt from having something dropped on it. UPS is not exactly known for its gentle handling of packages… Amazon should be aware of that and act accordingly.
If this had been an OEM disk, I would have returned it immediately, not even bothering to format. With the retail version, I’ll format and run a chkdsk.
But in continues to amaze me why Amazon so carelessly ships computer hardware with such poor packing. Makes me want to look ELSEWHERE for computer products.
Evening’s UPDATE: Call the coroner - this drive is DOA. Plugged it in, powered it up, can hear it come up to speed, then click click - it’s the head’s death rattle; Window’s disk manager waiting in vain for a disk that will never appear. Shame. UPS/Amazon has murdered another one… The only “good” news is, I won’t have to wait for chkdsk’s run…
Note: this is the RETAIL version - i.e., comes in its own box, not an OEM (static bag only). If Amazon’s packaging can’t protect a retail box, think how an OEM would suffer…
Update (2/6/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.
The featured review for this product, Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB SATA II, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive WD10000LSRTL - Retail Electronics, was written by 11bravo.
The average rating for this item is out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.
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Tags: 1 tb, 1tb, hard drive, hard drives, internal hard drive, kit, mac, mac pro, macintosh, packaging, sata, seagate, storage, wd, western digital
Posted on: April 29, 2010
Filed under: Reviews
Reviews (3)
Pyanfar Chanur
March 29th, 2010 at 10:32 am
Swift and Silent
I purchased three of these Western Digital Caviar Black drives to put in a RAID array. I play with hardware all the time, but something about these drives just seemed right–I found myself in a pretty good mood once I’d got them into the box. Seek times are low, the cache is high, and while the RPM isn’t 10,000, the price is certainly right.
Slipping all three of these into my file server was super-easy, but that’s really due to the tray design in my hardware array: the connectors aren’t really any better or worse than any other drives because hard drive parts are fairly standard. Mostly what impressed me was that the drives spun up right away, were ready to roll in seconds, and are very, very quiet. This drive cage is a bit open and it sits on my desk, but I don’t hear a lot of noise when doing read/writes. I’ve put about a quarter of a terabyte on them so far, and I’ve got plenty more where that came from.
I used to be a Seagate fan, but I was burned last year with a purchase that didn’t actually have the cache size promised on the box (I made Seagate take them back for that). Thus far, the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA II 32MB cache, 7,200RPM drives have continued to make me a WD fan. If you use these on a PC, you will probably find about 931MB of space. This is an industry thing, by the way: as far as your computer is concerned, 1,024KB = 1MB, 1,024MB=1GB & etc…but for reasons I never quite understood, companies at some point started rounding their specs off at 1,000. So a 1TB drive should technically mean 1,024MB of space, but the reality is the company only gives you 1,000MB and calls it good.
Strange, no? If you want to get down into the nitty-gritty details with your drive, take a look at the commentors to this review below, and also stop by the ntfs dot com site or Microsoft’s MSDN site and look up “hard drive optimization” (sorry I can’t post links: Amazon tends to remove them)
11bravo
April 5th, 2010 at 7:49 am
Disk good, packing bad (no, make that bad/bad)
Rated 4 stars.
M. Harrison
April 7th, 2010 at 5:27 am
5-yr warranty yes.
WD Caviar Black 1TB 32mb cache retail. Nice. This is apparently THE best drive right now considering the claimed performance and reliability. Price is very good at $99.
Get retail box instead of the OEM Bulk drive. Retail has better packing, better binning selection from the factory, and overall your best chance of receiving a reliable drive that performs the way it’s supposed to and will receive full warranty. (WD warranties the OEM bulk drive purchase 5yrs as long as it is shipped correctly, and there’s the rub).
Install is easy. Plug and play.
Drive gets WARM so place it with some airflow. I have a well-ventilated case and the drive is reading 34C (93F) at idle. That’s 10 degrees warmer than I’m used to with my old 160gb Caviar.
The papers in the box claim 5yr warranty. WD website concurs. I don’t think you need to register to get warranty service, just need your receipt. I have had no trouble from WD when I had to return a drive (did three last year) and I have never registered.
AMAZON SHIPPING IS STILL AN ISSUE. Retail 1TB Black arrived with the retail box intact but loose in the shipping box, with some packing material tossed in randomly. The drive is suspended in the retail container, so that the retail box protects to drive from direct impacts but I still wouldn’t want to drop or toss the box around. Unfortunately that is exactly what happens during shipping and Amazon is inconsistent about padding that box.
But I’m happy to say that the drive tested fine with Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics - Extended Test. BTW same goes for the OEM one I got in comparison (miraculous considering the shipping for that one!).
I did large file transfers between two of these on a fresh Windows & 64-bit install, P45/ICH10R motherboard (gigabyte ud3p) and throughput was 80MB/s - 114MB/s. I haven’t run any performance Diagnostics, just looked at the Resource Monitor once in a while. So, decent performance. I’m going to run hw2bench and see what I get.
It’s a bit noisy with two of these in my quiet PC case, but not a bad sound, just purring every second or so.
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