Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital WD3200KSRTL Caviar 320 GB SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive

I was suprised to find that the included SATA cable would not work
with my Dell Dimension E521 computer. Basically, there was this big
plastic thing on the end of the cable that plugged into the drive
that was too big for the enclosure. By the third "supervisor" on the
help line, I finally returned from India to the US and learned what
was going on. Western Digital had decided that the sata connector
spec was not physically robust enough -- apparently some had broken
and so they had (over-)engineered this monstrosity. Naturally, it
was my fault that it would not work with my computer. My options
appeared to be to return the drive or buy a "normal" sata cable. I
chose instead to snip off the offending plastic with some wire cutters.
Now the drive works great -- I only can't find the plastic piece since
it flew across the room and under some furniture in the process.

I routinely see about 72-73 MB/s sustained reads off of the drives (reading a GB at a time) even with the interface strapped at SATA-I speeds (but note, the drives support and are shipped ready to run at the speedier SATA-II speeds).

Pros: Fast, economical, and run fairly cool.
Cons: 1 year warranty, could be longer.

Drive arrived quickly, as usual, and I have had no problems. I have pretty much had this system drive running 24/7 since I received it about a month ago, and have not experienced a single hiccup or problem.

I use it as my single system drive in my new home-built. Drive is fast, quiet and trouble free.

I rated the product 3 stars because although it is very easy to install, I had a failure of the original identical drive after only 18 months.

I have a PC with a RAID mirroring disk drive array. The PC was purchased new from Dell in May 2007. When the failure occured in December 2008, it was out of OEM warranty (Dell, 1 yr), so I bought an exact replacement WD3200KSRTL unit from Amazon.

[...]

The replacement drive arrived from Amazon quicker than expected. The drive installed very easily, and the Intel RAID manager automatically restored the mirrored virtual drives with no loss of data.

I'm now waiting to see if the replacement drive, or the remaining original drive fails. If I get another failure, I will probably go with a higher quality (AKA more costly) drive next time.

I realize that RAID means Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Disks, but having been a maintenance engineer for internet access equipment in a past life, I really expect 3.5" disk drives to last more than 18 months. The MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 3.5" SATA disk drives is commonly touted as over 500,000 hrs (almost 6 years), and Western Digital has in the past made very fine products, so I am puzzled. I would be a happier camper if they failed within the warranty period, but then I used to calculate warranty periods, and we always set them at just before the MTBF curve peaking began. ;-D

When my 250GB drive went squirly, I bought this drive based on internet reviews that convinced me that WD was the drive maker to buy. 7200 RPM is Ok for my purposes and the drive replaced was also 7200 RPM. Installation was a breeze. The hard part was file transfered (sorting through 5 years accumulation). Considering the price paid, if I were not retired and a only a casual user, I would suggest buying 2 and setting them up in a RAID configuration. And if I were a business person needing extreme reliability I would have bought 3 for a RAID config. Very pleased with purchase. My first hard drive in 1981 was 10MB, was as big as a carryon suitcase, and cost $3800.00.