Whenever you get a new hard drive, run a badblock scan, preferably the default 4 pass write/read test. If impatient, run for 2 passes, or control-c when its done checking the 2nd/3rd pass. Then check the S.M.A.R.T. data to see if there are any: Reallocated Sector Count*, Reallocation Count*, Current Pending Sector Count*, Uncorrectable Sector Count*, Write Error Rate, 0 to small amount of read error rate (some fields and values vary across drives and manufactures, but the sector/reallocated fields should always be 0). Once you start getting bad sectors, replace the drive ASAP.
To test the drive:
Download and boot up a Linux distro. This process will take many hours to days to complete depending on the drive speed, drive size, USB vs SATA, chipset and computer, etc.
Open a terminal (or not already at a shell), then type:
sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 (or 512 if its an old drive..type 'fdisk -l' to show if its 512 or 4096 sector format) /dev/sdX (X is your particular device) , example: sudo badblocks -wsv -b 4096 /dev/sda. There is an optional -c which specifics the amount of blocks at a time to process, it may or may not increase the speed. If you use it try -c 131072 or -c 65536, or -c 32768, or -c 16384. Might come in handy if testing multiple drives at once.
Try running it for 10-20 seconds with a -c [xxxxxx] or leaving it out, and ctrl-c after 20 seconds--do that for 3-4 different block speeds to determine which one progresses the furthest @ 20 seconds (or whatever interval you count to). For me, leaving the -c option out worked best.
What you are doing is exercising the drive and writing all: 00000000s, 11111111s, 10101010s, and 01010101s patterns across the entire space of the drive, and verifying that it correctly wrote every single bit that writes to the platter. Usually (not always) if a drive is bad, it will show up sooner than later, so you are giving the new drive a solid workout to determine if the drive is defective or not.
These are mid-level desktop drives with only a 2-year warranty. Mid-Level HDDs used to have a 3 year (sometimes 5) year warranty. Yeah, it's not a bad idea to get into the mindset that when you buy a new HDD, don't expect to be able to use if for a few days until after you test it! It's only your data . . .
I gave this drive to someone as a gift, and they've been using it for backups for 10 months without issue.
My review is based on another unit of this drive which I bought for myself some months later. I've been using it as my primary desktop OS/programs drive since 5/29/2014, so it's about 5 months now. There have been no problems thus far. It's really quite a bargain for desktop use if 1TB is all you need.
The actual capacity of this drive is 931.5GB. That's an old marketing trick which can be blamed for the pointless redefinition of all our real, long established data measurements with those silly "i" characters. I won't dwell on it any further, but 931GB is the true capacity when measured in base 2, as all data is correctly measured.
This 1TB Blue drive uses a single 1TB platter spinning at 7200rpm. There are 2 heads (each side is 500GB).
A single platter design is usually better for reliability than having multiple smaller platters, because there are fewer points of failure, the assembly is lighter, the motor doesn't have to work as hard, and less heat is generated.
Single platter drives will also tend to be quieter, but due to my configuration I can't judge the noise level.
There has been much discussion and testing among users in online forums, including WD's forum, which repeatedly show that the 1TB Blue and 1TB Black perform the same. It appears the only benefit of the 1TB Black is a longer warranty. Some Blacks are faster than this drive, but the 1TB model is not.
Compared to a Green, the Blue is faster owing to it's faster rotation speed. The Green drives also have an "intellipark" feature which causes them to keep parking the heads after a few seconds of inactivity. This can cause laggy response and extra wear. I dislike that design - I believe power management functions should be left under the control of the operating system, which can account for user preferences and what is happening in the rest of the system. Hardcoding this behavior into the drive is ridiculous, in my opinion. The Blue behaves the way I prefer - it does not use "intellipark", it stays ready to roll until directed otherwise through power management commands from the OS.
I wish they were making the Blue series in larger sizes - it seems this 1TB is the end of the line. I don't care for the Greens and the Blacks are more expensive.
Partition/Sector Alignment
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Please be aware that like most modern drives, this drive uses 4KB sectors (also known as "advanced format"). If you are using Windows 2003, Windows XP or older, as I am, don't let Windows handle the partitioning of this drive. This is even an issue on unpatched versions of Vista and Windows 7. These older versions of Windows will believe that the physical sectors are 512 bytes, when in reality they are 4KB. As a result, the partition(s) will not be aligned with the physical sectors. It will still work, but performance will be reduced.
Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP and older do not have any update to fix this, but it's not a problem as long as you do the partitioning with a suitable 3rd party utility. I think Western Digital offers a tool for this, but I've never tried it. Once the partitions are set, it's fine to let Windows format them.
For my Windows XP install, I used a recent version of GParted to partition the drive. GParted can be downloaded and burned to a bootable CD, or installed to a USB flash drive. Just use the option to align your partition(s) on 1MB boundaries. This is the easy way to ensure they are aligned correctly for the best performance. Then boot your WinXP install disc and let it format the partition that you already created. It sounds harder than it is, it's a minor hassle but it's simple.
If you ever change the partitions, once again use GParted or a similar utility that handles alignment for modern hard disks. Don't use the built-in XP partitioning. But again, once the partitions are created, it's fine to let Windows format them.
The built-in partitioning is fixed in Windows 8.
According to Microsoft, it is fixed in Windows 7 after installing Service Pack 1 - you would need to have that service pack before partitioning the drive, not after.
Again according to Microsoft, it is also fixed in Windows Vista *after* installing update MS KB 2553708 - I assume this is automatically installed for people who use automatic updates, but I don't know that for a fact. This won't do you any good if you're doing a fresh install and your install disc predates the required update.
The partition alignment detail I've described above is an issue you will encounter with any recent hard drive, it's not unique to this model. If you ignore it, performance will be affected but it will still work. You may see Seagate drives implying that they are immune from this, but in reality, they are not. All modern "advanced format" drives, of any brand, will perform better if sectors are properly aligned. But it's not a big deal - just use a modern partitioning utility and then you're set.
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I just tested this drive using "Roadkil's Disk Speed" on Windows XP 32-bit. I'll cut out all the variables and just give the linear transfer results with large block sizes. My drive has a few partitions and there are lots of files on it, so this might affect results.
First partition (first 20GB): 170-178MB/sec linear read
3rd partition (physical location range is from 28-628GB): 153-177MB/sec linear read
Last 300GB is unpartitioned so I can't test that range.
I don't think the random access test is useful, because my partitioning greatly influences the result.
There's a test mode for the whole physical disk, but it's results are too inconsistent.
This drive is a great bargain if you just need a simple, inexpensive, well performing 7200rpm hard disk. I was tempted to try a Seagate SSHD, but I couldn't justify the cost compared to this. If I was shopping today, I'd look carefully at the HGST and Toshiba offerings as well, but from the WD side this is my pick for a general purpose 1TB desktop drive.
Update: It is now 11/2015. This drive is in my desktop PC, used daily, and still works fine.
Some months ago I ran a benchmark on this drive using the linux utility "gnome-disks". The random access performance measured out to a 15.7ms average. This is mediocre, but expected from a quiet drive. Screenshot is attached. It also shows the transfer rate across the disk (read test only, I didn't test writes).
Blue 4TB version.
Comes with 3.63TB out of the box
Write speeds were around 80-100MB
Cannot hear it whatsoever
Came with excellent package protection (I was a bit worried about that)
EDIT: it's been 5 months now, and I absolutely love this little guy!! I really have nothing special to say about it! No overheating, no crazy noises, no hiccups, no lags, just flawless for its purpose, General Use! :)
Worth every cent. I had been putting off buying a much larger stroage drive. Finally got one now I can store much more for much longer, get bulk files off of my work drives etc. This drive is a storage drive, not a performace drive. I use it to store files, movies etc. For gaming, and the such, I either use my SSD or my WD BLACK hard Drive. I am glad I picked this up, I have not had a single issue with it, and it has freed me up to do more with my other drives as I no longer have to have them filled up with large files I rarely use. Below are the color codes for WD drives. I do not know how different their performance are from one to another or if it is all marketing, but here it is.
BLUE = Solid performance and reliability for everyday computing.
BLACK = Maximum performance for power computing.
RED = Increased workloads and reliability.
PURPLE = Designed for Surveillance DVR storage.
GOLD = WD Gold HDD is designed for Servers
and some of you mentioned i forgot the green, Thanks
GREEN---Parks the heads for power savings
I've had this ~3 weeks now. Installed it very easily, just connected my PC's power and SATA cables, switched on, recognized immediately by my Win10 x64 desktop PC, did a quick format, and good to go. No drivers or other software adjustments needed.
Shows 3.63 TB available. I transferred 1 TB of my main work data onto it day one, and have been using that since without any issue. Very quiet.
I wouldn't recommend this drive to hold your operating system, since it's the slowest 5,400 rpm HD speed. I always put OS on a fast SSD, and my data on a slow HD, that's the best value combo for general business work and gaming.
I've used a good few Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung HDs in decades of computing, and found them all reliable brands.
Feature Product
- Reliable everyday computing
- WD quality and reliability
- Free Acronis True Image WD Edition cloning software
- Massive capacities up to 1 TB available
Description
Western Digital WD Blue 3.5-inch PC hard drives deliver solid reliability for office and web applications, and they are perfect for extra storage for desktop PC computing.
I have purchased several of these over the past few years for use in a home file server.
These are reliable drives. I am running four of these in a file server, soon to be five, and have been running them for around three years with zero failures or SMART warnings. No drive lasts forever, but so far these just keep trucking along. When the inevitable drive failure occurs, I will likely replace the drives with the same model if it is still available. I highly recommend GSmartControl. It runs in both Linux and Windows, is free/open source, and will provide a full SMART report including the usual indicators of a drive that is going to fail: bad sectors, and number of reserve sectors available. Once a drive has bad sectors and starts remapping reserve sectors, it is time to start migrating data before the inevitable data loss occurs. So far, three years in, I have not a single bad sector across four of these drives.
Speed-wise, they are what you would expect from a 5400 RPM spinning hard drive. Nowhere near the fastest, but fast enough for what I need them to be. Install an SSD for your boot/OS drive, maybe a WD Black 7200 RPM drive for programs, and use these for storing your media files. The important thing to do is gauge what level of performance you need for a particular task and how much money you are willing to spend.
For mass data storage where speed is not a requirement, these drives work very well and I highly recommend them. If you need performance, look at SSDs. If you need speed but also size and do not want to spend a ton of money on a large SSD, look at the WD Black 7200 RPM drives.
This is the fifth hard drive I've purchased of this exact same model. No, this order was not because the previous 4 failed (they all still work flawlessly for my various onsite/offsite backups). This was to replace a failed Seagate hard drive in my mid-2010 iMac. Knowing that this model has been without issue for many, many years - I was thrilled to learn that I could still buy the exact same model years later.
If you are an iMac owner, do note that the OEM drives Apple puts in also has a port for the temperature sensor. These non-OEM drives do not. As a result, the Mac will sense that it's not getting a temperature reading from the HD sensor, so it will crank the fan up to high in order to protect itself. However, the fans at 100% are really, really loud and not a long term solution. There is an adapter plug you can get (search on Google), but I did a different hack instead. I unscrewed the circuit board from the failed HD and plugged the temp sensor into the port on the old board - then inserted it in a cavity next to the internal drive. Now the new hard drive is connected as normal, and the temp sensor is connected as well - and everyone is happy. BTW - yes, I did try using the smcFanControl utility before reusing the circuit board, but it did not work in my case.
I ordered this drive in April 2018 and it was sold and shipped by Amazon - not any 3rd party seller. At the good advice of other reviewers I searched the warranty status of the drive I received using the warranty status page on Western Digital's website. The warranty was good for 2 years and the website reported the serial number corresponded to a Blue drive so what I received was a legitimate Blue drive with the advertised 2 year warranty. Not much to say since this is a hard drive. It works and is running in my file server without problems. I plan on buying another that is sold and shipped by Amazon.
Update 10/6/2018: Bought another one of these drives shipped and sold by Amazon. Western Digital website says the drive I received has a valid warranty for 2 years and expires in August 2020. Drive is working good so I am again happy with my purchase. First drive I ordered is still working good also.
Worked great on Lenovo Desktop. From previous experience, I knew I could add this SATA III 6Gb/s as a secondary disk drive. Note: it does NOT come with needed 4 mounting screws, and does not come with any cables at all.
For my desktop, I needed a "Y" SATA power splitter cable, to get another power line to this drive. I also needed a blue SATA III data cable. I had bought these cables on a previous occasion from Amazon when I knew I would be doing two of these installs. I had onhand the small, probably metric, approximately 1/4 inch long computer screws needed to fasten this to the empty, available secondary drive bay.
I had added a secondary SATA drive once before to a different Lenovo desktop, so the actual physical install procedure took me only 15 minutes.
You then need to boot up and into Windows. Then, format it either as NTFS or FAT32, and choose partition type either MBR or GPT, and do a full format (which probably took an hour). For now, I'll use it for secondary storage.
If you plan on installing Win10, be sure to use GPT and not MBR partition type, and use NTFS format.
I use this as an internal backup drive. I have the backup utility in Ubuntu Linux configured to make a nightly incremental backup at 3 AM, which usually takes only a few minutes to sync with all changes made to my main hard drive during the previous day. I also make monthly uncompressed disk backups and keep the last three, and I have an external hard drive version as well. I'll eventually get another network attached storage device and keep everything backed up on that RAID device. My working hard drive is a solid state drive (SSD) and that makes this workstation run MUCH faster. Use the SMART drive diagnostics in the Western Digital hard drive to monitor the age, errors and remaining expected life of the drive and replace it before you start losing data. Hard drives are inexpensive. Your data is not. Choose a strategy to protect your data before your drive fails. Unfortunately, most people seem to think hard drives last forever, and they really miss their data when it's gone.
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