Western digital RE 3 TB Enterprise Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, SATA III, 64 MB Cache

CAUTION: I purchased this drive to do a full image backup of my system before updating it to the latest Linux OS. It is a WD Black 7200 RPM Drive with a MANUFACTURE DATE OF MARCH 2, 2015. The drive is advertised as being NEW and the ad also claims the drive has a 5 YEAR WARRANTY. I'm not sure who will be providing the warranty, but as long as it works for a week or two I'll be satisfied with it. The drive arrived in what appeared to be a factory static bag that was sealed with a big sticker warning about static discharge and potentially damaging the drive. The bag also had a 2nd sticker designed to be applied to a computer that shows the drive Part Number, Description and Serial Number as well as a bar code. The drive and static bag were placed into a blown plastic shock absorbing molded plastic packing material and installed at each end of the drive, then placed into a really heavy duty cardboard box with a label on the end showing the Part number, serial number and the word NEW in all Caps. The shipping label was affixed to this really heavy duty box and sent to me. The box arrived in great shape, and the drive also appeared new. I placed it into an external enclosure and connected it to my Linux system via USB 3 connector and was able to put a partition on it, format it and copy about 100GB of data to it a few times without any issues. The drive is super quiet and clean. For the price, it appears to be a bargain at this point and as long as it makes it through the first 30-90 days past the infant mortality range of time, I think it will be a long lasting drive. My only question is who is providing the warranty on the drive since it is already 8 years old and probably just old NEW OEM stock. Time will tell , but for the moment I 'm satisfied with my purchase.

I must say that I love the packaging this HDD came in that's very securely protected from damage. This drive is new as it was never used that is evident by the packaging. However, it is not recently manufactured though because the manufactured date shows 2015 on the label. Nevertheless, it is still new as it has not been used before.In using it, on the other hand, at first I didn't know or understood loading it in Linux that HDDs over 2TB is not supported in Linux where partitioning is concerned. I am using Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon and it apparently doesn't seem to have support for using drives greater in storage size than 2TB so no GPT partition style support except MBR partition style. So when I saw that the drive was somehow automatically divided into 4 preset partitions that could not be removed, resized or addition ones able to be created I thought that something was wrong with the drive itself. But when I decided to see what would happen when using it in Windows Disk Management Console a prompt came up asking what partition style that I would like to initialize the disk with either MBR or GPT.Not too familiar with the difference or benefits of one vs the other I decided to do a little research on the difference and benefits of using MBR vs GPT partition styles. As it turns out once you are using HDDs with a storage capacity greater than 2TB you must use GPT partition style to initialize the drive and great your partitions. MBR only supports less than 2TB and up to 4 partitions on the drive so that is why when I connected the drive in Linux and it showed only 4 preset partitions and prevented me from editing, deleting or creating additional partitions then I understood what was the problem.It wasn't the drive that was the problem but Linux OS doesn't support GPT except MBR. Whether or not this can be mitigated to switch to GPT to initialize a HDD with storage capacity greater than 2TB is not necessary for me right now. However, once I used Windows to setup the drive with GPT partition style I was able to create the partitions I wanted with no problems and everything now works great now.

Update Feb 2016 - I received a new RMA replacement drive from WD today. I plan to use it to store downloaded video and other junk - I would not trust it with anything important.Update Jan 2016 - this drive has had a sudden and total failure - it no longer undetectable by any PC. The drive reported no SMART errors and provided no other indication of a pending failure. I was better off with the Green drives, at least they gave an indication of failure and I was able to copy the data to another drive. With this drive my data is gone, gone, gone, never to be seen again. WD lists it as still under warranty so with any luck I'll get it replaced with a similar low quality piece of hardware.-- original review --I purchased 2 WD Green drives thinking they'd be great for my network-attached photo collection which needs to be available but has relatively infrequent read/write activity. Within 2 years both began reporting SMART errors. So 20 months ago I replaced both with these WD RE drives - one 1TB and one 2TB. So far there has not been one issue and now I plan to purchase two more of these drives.It is difficult or impossible to get a true measurement of hard drive reliability. The URE rate is a useful, although non-holistic representation of drive reliability. WD rates their Green and Black drives the same at 10^14, yet Amazon.com review comments suggest Green drives are less reliable than Black. Amazon reviews are some of the best data we have, given due scrutiny. Since WD indicates the reliability of the Black drive is just as bad as that of the Green (WD would have phrased this differently), I decided to steer away from the consumer line all together.This WD RE drive has a URE rate at 10^16, two orders of magnitude better than the Black. At first glance these numbers seem too large to be meaningful, but analysis can be found online using real-world models to illustrate the significant difference of even going up one level of magnitude in URE.

A good option to put in my pc for extra storage. Works well, speed is good.