Advantages: Fast, reliable & high size.
Disadvantages: Over heated alot when put threw its paces.

...I god this drive as I trust western digital as all my drives but 1 or 2 are all there brand and with no issues. However, apart from the high capacity, the speed it offers & technical support with some utility tools on WD website, I must rate this as adequate. The reasons are. Due to the high storage size, the head it generates is much higher than most hard drives. I was currently decoding & re encoding audio to video on the drive where it suddenly froze.. just the drive, nothing else.. Then for a good 5 minutes it would not show in boot up & really slowed down the boot up process because if it. The reason I found out was, it really overheated. Now, hard drives do overheat if you don’t keep them clean & maintained, such as disk keepers & so forth to keep the drive running in its prime. But its new, so this was not the cause... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, tidy cables, silent, runs cool.
Disadvantages: More money-wise to buy a 500gb drive?

...I purchased this drive about 3 months ago from eBuyer, taking advantage of the £10 off offer they had going with Google Checkout. This was my first SATA drive, my existing two being IDE. I figured a hard drive was just there to store data, so I didn't care about the interface or speed. How wrong I was. So for looks, well, they're all the same, until of course you come to the cables. The thin SATA cable instantly frees your system of the clutter made from intertwining IDE strips. If you like to show off, with a windowed case, or if you just like to have things organised then move to SATA just for this reason alone if you've yet to. So after plugging in, the drive is recognised straight away in POST, and once loaded the Windows Setup, the drive is formatted to 298GB (298 Gigabytes = 319,975,063,552 bytes). The format process took... Read review

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Advantages: Great speed, great storage space, low price, stability
Disadvantages: A little hot, A little noisy

...I used many Hard Drives drives until this one and I'm finally satisfied. As a multitasking user i open many programs at the same time: antivirus, internet, multiple downloads, winamp and even gaming at the same time and often I even game sometimes and this hdd really does a good job. The 500GB (470 Gb actually) are sufficient for storage and comes at a very decent price. The wd are really reliable , I had a small problem but it was my fault, I've insanely overclocked the processor and I the hdd drive partitions didn't appear. I've recovered eventually the data without loss. It works still great. The transfer rates are insane: 80 Mb max at data read and 75 Mb max at data write, about 13 ms access time. The temperatures are pretty hot in summer, I recommend cooler. Stability: 4 full days of massive downloads, in summer is enough for you... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Large Storage, Cheap, Clever, Reliable, Easy install
Disadvantages: n/a

...this drive compeet with faster drives (WD raptor 10krpm) but for around £50-60 knock 2 of them in Raid-0 and you will most likely have a very large, very fast drive setup for £40-50 less than a faster drive! I would suggest if you're in the market for a large, reliable, quitet drive you realy do need to look at Western Digital's 250GB SE16 Drive as this drive ranks at the top of the hard drive food chain, and is industry standard coming from WD who are renowned for their quality and the life span of their products. Western digital SE (special edition) is another way of stating that this drive has 16mb of cache instead of the usual 8mb (overall faster performance for sustained use, ie network storage) The drive spins at 7.200RPM (rotations per minute) which is usualy classed as the norm for higher end hard drives, where as a slower drive... Read review

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Advantages: Fast and cheaper than others
Disadvantages: can always be cheaper

.... This is a serious buy, its not that much slower than enterprise hard drives like raptors. Raptors spin faster (10k rpm vs 7.2k rpm) and have lower latency but these benefits hardly show up to the average user at home and the drawbacks of much less HD capacity (36gb for the price of one of these western digital 500gb HDs) and also the running temp and noise of raptors are enough to warrent a purchase of the WD 500gb hard drive over any Raptor. Seeing as raptors are out of the Question (in my own opinion, although others will agree with me) you could go for something cheaper, but like i said, as you go down in price the value goes down a lot. For about 15 pounds less you end up with much slowers drives that dont have much capacity. These drives deserve an award for such performance price ratio as well as capacity price ratio.... Read review

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Advantages: Sturdy. Good Quality.
Disadvantages: Compatible with SecureConnect hard drives only.

...I recently bought one of these cables to connect my hard drive (also WD – Western Digital) to my motherboard. I had never used SATA before and was only familiar with IDE cables – the annoying thick ones that are a pain to connect. Unlike IDE cables, SATA leads can only be plugged in one way at both ends. This cable holds the power connection stable too. This cable can only really be used on Western Digital hard drives, but they are a leading manufacture and highly recommended. Both WD Raptor and WD Caviar SE Serial ATA drives use this unique connection, but there are also other SecureConnect compatible hard drives out there. The main reason you would buy this rather than any old SATA cable is because of its SecureConnect design which holds it in place nice and tight. I have a WD raptor drive, and following the usual hard drive... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable, cheap
Disadvantages: Can't think of any

...not for there are settings on the back that allow the device to slow down to SATAI speeds. So if your using a SATA system and your thinking maybe you will upgrade to SATAII in the future this would work for you. Western digital are great company, I always buy my hard drives from them because I have never had one fail on me. This particular device is an 80Gb derivative and will contain a maximum of 74Gb of data when formatted using NTFS. When a drive is made it is not formatted. The idea of formatting is to allow your computer to know where it has stored its data on the device. As such a large table is made which compares the location on the hard drive to the data stored there this takes up about 8% of your overall space. NTFS is just a file system standard and doesn't need to mean much to most people. I have shown the sequential read/write speeds of the device... Read review

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Advantages: Lots of space, cheap, reliable
Disadvantages: Can't hoenstly think of any

...If we look at the name of this device, 'Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB', we can infer a great deal of information. 'Western Digital' is the manufacturer, 'Caviar' is the produce line, 'SE16' tells us that this is a special edition device with a 16Mb (1Mb = 1024Kb, 1Kb = 1024b) cache, 'WD2500KS' is the model number and 250Gb is the device size in raw data format. Western Digital are a good company and in fact I buy all of my hard drives from them because they have never failed on me. The Caviar device line has been in operation for about six years and has included IDE devices as well as the newer SATA and SATAII devices. The special edition bit of that means effectively nothing, it is simply a marketing thing, but the 16Mb cache is very important. Normally hard drives have an 8Mb cache and used to have a 2Mb cache... Read review

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Advantages: Quick, reliable, cheap and lots of space
Disadvantages: The OEM unit comes without SATA cables or screws.

...speedily, slightly faster than an IDE device. Capaicty: 465GB. This is due to the nature of the manufacturers not using the binary computing figures where 1GB actually equals 1,024MB rather than 1000MB, and also formatting it loses some of the storage space. This is enough for a lot of pictures, music, movies and anything else however! Overall: Great product and a fantastic price.... Read review

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Advantages: Large storage capacity , very fast, very quite in operation
Disadvantages: a bit bulky but hey i want the storage.

...The reason I brought this drive ? lets see now........ Its from a reliable manafacturer of hard drives. It has 250 GB of storage, it has 16Gb of Ram and its Sata II compliant. Installation was straightforward if your used to pulling stuff out of your PC and adding new bits. PERFORMANCE. Well for me it had a WOW factor of warp 10 very very fast I cant hear it operate have to check the light to make sure its seeking / writing .Took a while to format .....well its 250 GB so worth the wait. I have been using mine now for about 5 months I installed XP pro as the operating system and now its stuffed full of videos my whole CD collection web pages letters photos stuffed and theres still loads more space left to use. I am not going to get technical here if you want that read the manafacturers site. Just say its fast is working fine... Read review

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