Western Digital 320 GB Scorpio Black SATA 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive WD3200BEKT

I was budget limited when I ordered this drive and it was simply the best sub-$100 laptop drive out there.

Since the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200.4 fell below $100, however, this drive has lost the performance crown and the Seagate is quieter as well.

However, it's still a great performance drive for the money, and will only run slightly hotter and noisier than an average 5,400rpm drive, while giving you a very noticeable speed jump.

So here's the deal... I gave some serious consideration to returning this drive but in the end decided that it's worth keeping though I wouldn't purchase it again. It performs great... very fast, vast improvement over my oem 5400rpm. I noticed only the slightest increase in heat so no big deal there.

Here's the caveat: It's noisy, but not in the way I expected. The drive doesn't spin very loudly, or produce any noticeable vibrations, but the head is constantly (every 1-1.5 seconds) trying to re-park itself during idle, and it's LOUD. It drives me absolutely insane. After thorough research I've learned this to be an incompatibility between the drives power saver, and windows power saver functions. Apparently it's a relatively common problem and not isolated to this one drive.

I've found a fix in quiteHDD ([...]). It works, but I'm not entirely convinced that it won't ultimately reduce the life of the drive. Sure the head isn't moving as much, but I'm pretty sure it keeps the drive spinning 100% of the time, and doesn't allow it to idle as efficiently. This is only a guess though, I'm definitely not an expert. I ran the WD Diagnostic tool with quiteHDD running as a service and it passed so hopefully all will be well.

Regardless of whether the fix will hurt the drive or not, it's pretty ridiculous to have to go through such an issue with a brand new hard drive, and for that reason I wouldn't purchase it again. I've read that the model BJKT (with free-fall sensor) doesn't have this problem but I can't confirm that.

Anyway, to each their own.. it works very well, if not for the "click click click click..." I suppose if it's a windows compatibility issue Mac users won't notice it, and perhaps different versions of Windows won't either (I'm running W7 Home Premium 32 bit on a Dell Inspiron 1720). This issue doesn't happen with the WD drive that came installed in the computer.

Good luck, hope this was helpful.

I recently decided to upgrade my hard drive in my macbook pro and chose the wd3200bekt because I wanted a speed boost (5400 vs 7200 RPM) and I wanted more storage space (250 vs 320 GB). I received my first drive and proceeded to install it and then restore from a time machine backup. The restore stalled at 12.6%, with 6 hours remaining. Granted, I am using a FW 800 7200 RPM external so it really shouldn't take that long... I restarted and proceeded to install the OS (10.6), which took 2 hours (normally it takes less than 1 hour). After that, the computer was extremely slow, so I shut it down, swapped in my old drive and requested an exchange. I just installed the replacement and got the similar results. So I have given up using this particular brand and I hope that no one else has such problems... Reading other reviews it seemed that this was a good drive to use but after getting 2 in a row with poor results, I would not recommend this drive to somebody The hard drives that I received were manufactured within a month of each other (Sept 24 and Oct 19) of this year.

My macbook pro 13' orginally came with a measly 160GB HDD at 5400rpm, so I did my research with HDD's, and I found this one. It is truly an awesome HDD- you will notice a speed boost for everything loading up, and contary to what you might think, with less sound than the original HDD.

Pros:
-loads everythign faster: pictures, videos, mp3's, and so on
-quieter than the original HDD
-plenty of space to download whatever you want

Cons:
-might drain battery resources a tad bit faster, though in the end I'm sure it makes up for it a little by loading things faster


Conclusion:

If you can get this HDD for your laptop (if it fits), then get it. It's given me NO problems. This is not a SATA II like people here mentioned, so don't worry about it giving you compatibility problems- works great on my macbook. I would definitely recommend this.

This drive runs like 10 degrees cooler than the original that came with my Dell laptop. I've seen others than run cooler. It's pretty quiet, you could probably hear it if you were in a room quiet enough to hear a clock ticking, but the clock would probably be louder. The speed is average to maybe a little faster than most 7200rpm drives. I've been buying Western Digital hard drives since my first computer I've owned and they've outlasted how long I owned the computer. Not too mention they have a decent warranty as well, 3 years. I definitely recommend this drive.