Pros: This is a very fast drive with great reliability - I have had no problems in over 1 year with it. It gets moderate loads and is on nearly 24/7

Cons: Capacity/price per GB is not great compared to higher capacity drives. This wasn't a big deal for me though since it will take me forever to go through 500GB (all I have is documents, a couple apps, and a ton of photos - not much music/videos/games).

Overall Review: Faster than my older 74GB 10k rpm Raptor drive that I paid $190 for back in 2005...

Pros: Perfect complement to the 37 GB Raptor I use up front for my Windows XP 32-bit system drive (C: D: E:). Caviar Black holds my paging drive and data archives (F: G: H:).

Cons: None.

Overall Review: Used HD Tune to test Caviar Black against my Raptor. Raptor Avg. Transfer Rate: 72.1 MB/Sec Access Time: 8.1 ms Burst Rate: 115.3 MB/Sec Operating Temp: 107 degrees F Caviar Black Avg. Transfer Rate: 72.7 MB/Sec Access Time: 12.5 ms Burst Rate: 146.8 MB/Sec Operating Temp: 87 degrees F

Pros: Fast, quiet, and cheap.WD has never did me wrong, still have a 80 GB pata drive that has been running 24/7 since 2002

Cons: None

Overall Review: I am amazed that I can go to any HD product review section, and there is at least one person complaining how they "lost" GBs after formatting or windows robbed them out of GBs, and their tech level is always marked "high".How can you have a "high" level of tech knowledge and not know the difference between binary GBs and decimal GBs???? HD manufacturers use decimal GBs, which are equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes OSes use binary GBs(gibibyte or GiB), which are equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes So you're NOT losing anything and every byte you paid for is still there, period

Pros: This is an inexpensive drive that performs very well. That 5 year WD warranty is a nice bonus. I have 2 of these in a RAID0 that perform very nicely.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: A prior reviewer ran HD Tune against a Raptor (I believe a 36Gb) and this WD drive. I was a little delirious (!?) about the posted results until I did my own HD Tune test on a couple of RAID0 setups I have, with the following results: Raptors 2 X74Gb RAID0 Avg. Transfer Rate: 110 MB/Sec Access Time: 8.5 ms Caviar Black 2X500Gb RAID0 Avg. Transfer Rate: 140 MB/Sec Access Time: 12.5 ms Burst Rate: 138 MB/Sec

Pros: Great drive, but I still don't understand why WD is not posting the single platter variant or the duel 250gb platters. There's a major difference in the 2 drives with the same item number yet there is no mention of it here. Be advised to ensure you are getting the WD5001AALS-00L3B2 which has the single 500gb platter (much faster) not the WD5001AALS-00L3B duel variant

Cons: Western Digital and Newegg should be specifying those variants as they are important specifically in benchmarking

Pros: It arrived on time... RMA service available, Newegg rocks!

Cons: HD was DOA. HD came in OEM packaging, which is another phrase for one layer of bubblewrap. $$$ to ship back to Newegg, more than i thought.

Overall Review: Newegg is the best, so this is nothing against them, however there are a ridiculous number of DOA reviews for this item on Newegg. I recieved this item OEM and it arrived in only a single layer of bubble wrap, NOTHING else except for the small bag it was in. I felt that more could have been done to protect this product during shipping. All they did was throw it in a box with a wadded up piece of packing paper and it was free to bounce around with two other items in the box... The drive went through the normal "reformat" process and got through the "progress bar". But, when it finished what appeared to be a successful reformat process Windows said it was "unable" to format the disc, suggesting that it "may be damaged". So, I tried a second time. This time as soon as a partition was made and the reformat process began I got the BSOD (blue screen of death). I tried at least ten more times but never got past BSOD.

Pros: Sustained disk reads over 90MB/sec. Kills my gigabit LAN. Runs at 32 degrees C. Giant 32MB cache.

Cons: Maybe the price.

Overall Review: All manufacturers have the occasional bad drive get out the door. Drives can fail suddenly and without warning, despite SMART technology. That's why backups are so important. MAKE BACKUPS. You'll thank me later.

Pros: Price Performance Free Shipping

Cons: None Yet

Overall Review: Should have spent the extra 5 bucks and got the 640GB, Oh well!