Stay away for now. 2TB version., December 10, 2010

I have been waiting ages for a large capacity hard drive that runs at 7,200rpm and this Caviar black has most definitely answered my call.Lets look at the technical specs first... As Borat would say, They're very nice! (bet you didn't expect a lame Borat reference did you?)It features: Two Processors, Four 500GB platters, 64MB of cache and a dual mode actuator system that, (to make a long story short) enables precision head tracking that speeds up your seek times. Plus like most Western Digital hard drives, this one features a No-Touch loader, meaning the read and write head never comes in contact with any of the platters, increasing the life span of the hard drive.Now to benchmarks. (all testing performed on an Intel 2.4Ghz Q6600 paired with XFX 780i Sli Mobo and recorded in HDTach)First off, this thing has the fastest sustained writes and reads of any standard magnetic drive I've used. (or heard of for that matter) Mine exceeded 113MB/s each...

This hard drive came basically loose in a box and was rattling around. Upon opening the box I found another box. Inside the second box was a hard drive that was basically loose. The second box was constructed in a way that, if it had been made of quality materials may have held the hard drive securely. But because of the cheapness of the construction, it had completely failed (tiny cardboard tabs were supposed to be in tiny slots but weren't) thereby releasing the hard drive so that it could bounce freely around in every direction with every drop or bang.I will *not* consign 2 terabytes of data to a drive that has been shipped improperly and outside of Western Digital's shipping specifications. Hard drives consist of moving parts that must operate at high speeds for years with only microns of tolerance. The *last* thing a hard drive needs is to be banged about for days in a poorly packaged box. I will never buy a hard drive from Amazon again unless it is a retail drive...

Its not often that I take the time to write a review on a product, but I had to do it for this drive. I have been in the IT field for over 20 years and though I have seen it all.I purchased 3 of the 2TB Black drives in the last month. One here on Amazon and the rest, somewhere else. Out of the 3, 1 was DOA, 2nd died in 3 hours and the last, had so many bad sectors that WD's own software ran for 13 hours and it finally gave up and errored out. This is completely unacceptable in this day and age. How can they be releasing 3TB drives when they have huge issues with the 2TB offerings. It almost seems like they are having problems with the latest batch reading through some review on other sites. I also purchased a couple of the 640GB drives and these Im extremely happy with. Even the 2TB Green drives have been good to me. Out of the 8 that I purchased this year, only one had to be replaced, which I consider acceptable.Thankfully, WD's RMA process is painless, but...