Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AACS 500GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache SATA 3.0 Gb/s Hard Drive

We purchased two of these WD 500 GB Green drives, one for a PfSense box and another for video and file backups, when they were on sale for about $25 each, new in the bags. We don't normally go for 'green' drives but the seller had good feedback and we've never had any real problems with WD drives (not counting a single, 400-MB WD drive that was DOA, in the moldy-oldy mid-1990s; WD shipped a replacement out pronto, so it worked out OK). Not sure WD does warp-speed style drive replacement now of even the current model line without considerable wrangling involved and unless you pickup a third party policy, after 30 days, these are probably yours, period, so do check them out well in the first 30 days.These green drives have performed extremely well in the short time they've been in service, and I wouldn't have thought so given what the rep was on green drives 10 years ago, these run well enough they'd probably make decent main OS drives as long as you weren't building a gaming rig and had a slave drive or extra data archive capacity.The drive we placed in the firewall/router box doesn't get as much of a work out compared to it's twin, but the second drive is used for video playback, downloading and transferring files and doesn't disappoint. We tested both drives with Spin-Rite 6 for 24 hours before putting them into service; no errors were detected. Both drives were new (old stock) with no service hours. One drive was three years old from DOM, the other five but the sale price made the set a deal considering what these were selling for after the floods in 2011. We can always pick a new 1-TB WD Blue for $50, that spins at 7200 RPM with 64 MB of memory, with a full 2-year WD warranty and they still make excellent OS drives. Whether they're sitting in a USB dock or as a slave in a Windows system, these green drives deliver whatever we need.The original vendor is no longer listed but we'll probably pick up several more as long as the price is right. Since they're new in the bag and fulfilled by Amazon, with 30 days to test them for errors, you can get a replacement still have a great deal. We hope the review enables other Amazonians make good purchasing decisions.

I had to get this to transfer files from an old computer and it works amazingly! Nice and whisper quiet, even sitting out on top of my computer. For the price I paid, it's a solid investment for a chunk of storage space.

I bought this HDD drive for my friend and it works great but after 2 days i was copying big file from external HDD and PC starts showing blue screen then i chacked hdd with crystal disk app and it shows 1 pending sector i dont know why it shows that but after that i changed sata cables and now PC working great

Hard drive is being used as extra storage. The speed is slow (to be expected, not slower than expected however). But the price point is just right. Great as a backup for media.