Western Digital WD RE4, 1 TB 3.5" Enterprise Hard Drive with 7200 RPM & 64 MB Cache

When my rarely-used gaming desktop's hard drive failed after just three years, I was pretty irritated. I wanted something that was reliable above all, and I wasn't too concerned about speed or noise or much else. I decided that an enterprise drive with a 5-year warranty would do the trick, and I bought this one. It's not as fast as the 256GB solid-state drive in my MacBook, but it shouldn't be. This is easily the fastest mechanical hard drive I have ever used, despite being handicapped with SATA 2.0. I see this as a bonus, since I was really just looking for reliability. I bought the 1TB version for about $110, which I think is a pretty good value considering the drive's five-year warranty and performance ambitions. If you're looking for negatives, the only one I can come up with is noise. Most drives today are nearly silent--this one is not. It's definitely not a bad noise, it just reminds me of the way my old desktop from 2005 sounded; just faster and more refined. I'm not bothered by it, and it certainly deserves all five stars. With 6GB of RAM and my 2009 Core i7 Quad processor, Windows 8 Pro boots quickly and runs brilliantly.

Purchased these drives for a RAID 1 array paired with a Synology 211 NAS.Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS211 (White) These drives have the TLER function for running in a RAID array and are listed as compatible and recommended by Synology. The failure rate of these drives are extremely low because they are < 1TB (larger drives tend to have higher failure rates at the time I am writing this review). Also, since these are part of the Enterprise line of hard drives, the MTBF is considerably higher than the consumer class drives. Perfect for a NAS with precious files!!!Consistency/Parity check and S.M.A.R.T. check passed no problem on two drives purchased. Each drive arrived in a cardboard box (sealed with packaging tape). Inside each box was a single drive inside of sealed anti-static packaging, with plastic risers encasing the drive so it wouldn't bang around during transit. I wish every drive shipped this way! No screws, cables, etc.. didn't need them. If you do, be sure to order some!

This HDD is currently in the computer I am using to write this review. I've had it for a while and there's not much to say about it. It functions as intended, hasn't slowed down over time, and has the amount of storage specified in the product's description and title.The 1 thing I'm not too fond of is this drive's noise when under heavy use. It can get pretty loud with a weird grinding noise but so far no issues.

I was running out of space on my RAID 10 drive which was 4x640gb WD Caviar Blacks so chose these as replacement. They are running on a 3Ware 9640SE raid card fine. In my case, they run about 91 degrees F, your results will vary obviously depending on your case set up. These are a tad noisier than the previous drives, but not enough to be a concern, hard to hear them over the case fans which are not super quiet on my system.All the drives ran when I received them, no DOAs but 1 did fail the WD drive tool test. I contacted Amazon and was cross shipped a replacement at no cost, received in 2 days. This is one very good reason to buy drives from Amazon vs other online computer hardware companies which will charge shipping for replacements. I highly recommend using the WD drives tool on any WD disk you buy prior to setting up on your system. Use the short and long test. My drive passed the short test but failed the long test.If you are upsizing an array that will auto rebuild, just replace 1 at a time letting it rebuild before replacing the next drive. This worked great for the RAID 5 drive on the MB ICH10R. Using the Intel Raid Management tool (free download) I resized without losing any data after all 4 drives were in place. The RAID10 on the 3Ware card would not upsize using 3DM2 tool so I contacted LSI who wrote a script to upsize the array. Ran the script as directed but it only upsized half the array, so it became corrupt and I lost the array. Fortunately I had just made a System Image on a single disc (2TB WD Red) and was able to quickly restore the image using the Windows 7 disk. If you have a RAID card, there's a pretty good chance the Win7 installation will not have the RAID drivers included, so make sure you have those available on a USB or floppy before getting into a position that might require you to restore an image after losing an array.