Western Digital WD Green WD15EADS 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: WD Green == low heat, low noise, low energy consumption

Cons: earlier production manufacturing QC issues

Overall Review: I have had numerous WDXXEADS and EACS. We bought two of these 1.5s to try them out, especially since their price point puts them lower $/GB than the 1 TB drives (albeit just barely). The thing that impressed me was the packing for our order. It was MUCH better than any other HD order we have done from Newegg. Maybe they had too many problems w/ DOA drives ? One other thing that I want to note is that whenver I get a new drive I format it then run a surface/bad block scan. Both of these came back clean. We have a WD10EADS that I had bought 2 weeks ago that I need to return as it has 11 bad blocks right out of the gate (it also wasn't packaged as well as the WD15EADS were).

Pros: Price vs. Space is great, and the ability to use these in RAID when TLER is enabled makes it one of the cheapest high-end RAID solutions out there. Newegg RMAx4 in process. Refunding me and allowing me to order new ones for faster turn-around at the same price I bought them!

Cons: Ordered 8. 4 were bad with sectors beyond repair. I test before I turn on TLER or mess with WDIDLE just in case. Western Digital Diag even said they were, most of them in a simple quick scan.

Overall Review: I have 20 WD20EADS drives that were all perfect and haven't had to replace any. This is making me wary, but I'll trust it was just bad luck and run extended tests on the 4 good ones and the 4 replacements. I RECOMMEND YOU DO AN EXTENDED TEST WHEN YOU GET YOURS.

Pros: Huge capacity for the price, .

Cons: Not free.

Overall Review: I have bought three of these for RAID5 and so far no problems. One thing I did though, is add a jumper to the pins 3-4 here is the excerpt from WD site "All Western Digital Serial ATA hard drives come with PM2 (power management) disabled. This setting should be used for desktop/workstation computers. If you are using the drive in a RAID/enterprise environment, and wish to enable power management on the drive (controlled spinup via spinup command per ATA standard), place a jumper shunt on pins 3 and 4." Some people have had problems with these, it leads me to believe that its not the drive that has a problem but a system that will not see a drive over 1tb.

Pros: Good drive for media storage/backup. I have the 1TB version and have had good luck with it.

Cons: I had to RMA my drive for bad sectors; seems like a common complaint on this drive. It had a Nov.'09 mfg date. WD sent me the 64MB cache WD15EARS version as replacement, which you may want to consider instead. (Note: you have to pay return shipping when you RMA to WD).

Pros: High capacity to price ratio

Cons: High failure ratio even for hard drives... Even for Western Digital hard drives.

Overall Review: Western digital seems to have realized that these drives have an unacceptably high failure ratio, as they've been pulled from store shelves and (seemingly) discontinued. Trying to get warranty replacements was a disaster, WD waited 2 weeks to tell me they had no supply available. Thankfully that was in time to return the first two to newegg, but now another has died and I'm completely out of luck because WD shows no interest in making right on prior sales.

Pros: Had this drive for 2 days. A surface scan for bad sectors and errors takes 5 hours. None found. Packed in small box with bubble wrap and peanuts, no apparent damage by UPS. Mine has 00P8B0 suffix, probably indicating only 3 platters, which is good. Manufactured August 3, 2009. Seems quiet, no issues so far. Capacity 1.36 TB formatted. Copied 204 gigs to it in 73 minutes.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: Temperatures not yet checked. Power saving versus Caviar black about 1.3 KWH per month at 12 hours per day operation--a couple of dollars a year. Using it only as backup drive, but it is acceptably fast for my usage.

Pros: Very Quiet, very cool and great size/cost. Perfect for my green PC and my WD HD TV.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I don't understand why some reviewers here complain it goes into power saving mode on their raid. If you don't want a drive to go into power saving mode then don't by a power saving drive! These are not maid for some raid configurations. These make awesome drives for a media server or for backups. They use less power than any other brand of low power drives. They are much faster than I expected. I am using them for streaming 1080P HD movies with DTS-HD sound with my Western Digital HD TV. Works great and can handle anything I throw at it. Drive is cool even after watching a 2 hour HD movie.

Pros: Great capacity, awesome price per MB, low power usage, and stays cool.

Cons: None, once I figured out why I couldn't format the whole drive. (See below.)

Overall Review: An issue I encountered when I was formatting the drive was that it would not format past 72% (or after 1.1TB.) I tried all kinds of things, changing the bus connector, checking the drive for errors, was recognized in BIOS as 1.5TB. It was all OK. I formatted two separate 500GB partitions on the drive and wanted to try on the leftover 396GB; but it still did the same thing. And I wasn't about to let a third of the drive just sit there. After some search result digging I found that this was an issue with the nForce chipset on the motherboard. Basically, the nForce version I had would not allow you to format partitions or drives that were greater than 1.1 TB. So, once I updated the chipset drivers, the last 396GB were formatted normally and now I can use the full drive. :) The full drive capacity is 1396GB after formatting.