WD Blue 8TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256MB Cache, 2 Year Warranty

(for details on the drive, please skip down the page, underneath my rant)The product arrived on the date it should have, nice and early in the day. However, despite being in the house, waiting for the delivery, the driver 'presumed' that nobody was home and left it with a neighbour.WHY ?!?!?!? I have no idea. Odd if you ask me.Then on top of that, he never left a card to say its been left with a neighbour. So the only way to trace it was when later in the day I saw it said delivered and managed to trace the signature to a neighbour. However I am new to the area and this was a major annoyance.Its not hard to knock.... or ring the bell.... or leave a 'sorry you were not home card'____________________________REVIEW ON THE DRIVEThis drive was well reviewed and in some ways appears superior to the caviar black, especially on 1TB models like mine. The price was good (despite nearly a £1 rise overnight)I have had bad experiences in the past with Seagate. So tend to stick to brands i have had good experiences with. Sony, Samsung, Zalman, Corsair etcThe drive is fast, has 1TB of storage. Its SATA3 with a 64mb buffer. So performs nicely.The only grueling thing done so far was copying files over from an old SATA 1-250GB blue. The writing speed was impressive. Several groups of 40-60GB in less than 10 minutes each.5/5 for the drive5/5 for speedy shipping1/5 for stupid parcel force man2/5 for packing - 1 end of the drive was un-bubblewrapped.

Western Digital are reliable. I have had more than a few mechanical drives fail on me but none of them have been Western digital. The drive is silent and great value for money. No cables come with this unit so if you do not have a new build and are purchasing this to add in an extra drive as opposed to replacing an old one do make sure you purchase the data cable and ensure that you have the power source cable as well or if you have a serial like mine which has four sockets in it, make sure one of the is free.So what can go wrong?Well for one thing since it is an unformatted drive, when you install it your computer will not show it on the "My computer" window in windows 7. You need to format the drive to NTFS (windows 7) and then it will show up. Partition the drive if you would like to and it should work well. Don't go returning the unit to Amazon as faulty as the next one will do exactly the same thing. (I didn't know this and looked at a video from newegg and it mentions this issue on new hard drives) Other than that its good reliable and cheerfully cheap. I have never installed a hard drive or built a new computer from scratch, but this was one of the easiest parts to install. Make sure you install it in the right data socket on your mother board as usually the new ones come with several SATA 6 and slower ones.

The Product arrived a day after dispatch, which was great but it caught me off guard as I hadn't bought the SATA cable yet!Yes, word of advice to anyone reading this review, SATA cables aren't shipped with this hard disk, which is to be expected but you can buy one of fairly good quality which will set you back less than £1. Alternately, if you are a first time desktop computer builder, and you're looking at this; most decent branded motherboards will come with complementary SATA cables.Anyway, I bought this as a second drive for my gaming build, as I was running dangerously low on disk space. As per norm with Western Digital Hard Disks, it works great. There's a few fiddly bits I needed to do in computer management to get windows to recognize the drive properly, but when it is set up that's all I needed to do.If your operating system doesn't recognize it straight away, don't panic, go to computer management and when you're prompted to initialize the disk, do so, it's basically writing zeros for you. Then, right click on the unallocated space, format it to NTFS and you're ready to go, windows will pick up the drive as a compatible storage space and you can start using it immediately.I swear by western digital, I've never had one fail on me yet in 10 years of building PCs so hopefully, this one won't let me down!

This is a cheap basic drive of which I have had many before. I use them for backing up photographs.So far I have never had one let me down.Set up---------This is a bare drive and need prior initialization before Windows will see it, you need to assign a drive letter to it. In Windows 7 you go to the control panel and click on Administrate Tools, Computer management, disk management and assign it a drive letter. By doing this it will be seen as a new Windows volume that can be formatted and used. IF you get stuck mail me and I will help you set it up.Performance.------------------For as basic drive it is good, fast write and reads and the drive is quite quiet.Overall.----------A great inexpensive backup drive. IT is also fast enough to act as a main system drive. However, I am spoilt as I have an SSD drive to boot up from.