Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital 750 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD7501AALS
Western Digital 750 GB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD7501AALS
See it at Amazon.com for $63.00Average Customer Rating
(4.5 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
Most Helpful First | Newest First | + Share72 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
1TB of space, 32MB cache *PLUS* SATA2? Absurd. Buy now
(5 out of 5) by Gordon Ewasiuk on Jan 20, 2009 (Washington, DC)I bought two of these. Just an insane price. Thanks, Amazon. The drives are bulk/OEM which means they come with nothing. Just the drives and the anti-static bags. Do your homework. If you want software to hold your hand through a hard drive install, do not buy this drive. If you need screws, rails, or cables, do not buy this drive.
If you want to save some cash while getting an absolutely absurd amount of disk space with SATA2 (3Gbps) plus 32MB of cache (older drives have 4-16MB), then get these drives. They are beasts.
After the Seagate fiasco, I vowed to go with an alternative. Western Digital came through with these monster hard drives. Get one. Get two. You will not be disappointed.
If you want to save some cash while getting an absolutely absurd amount of disk space with SATA2 (3Gbps) plus 32MB of cache (older drives have 4-16MB), then get these drives. They are beasts.
After the Seagate fiasco, I vowed to go with an alternative. Western Digital came through with these monster hard drives. Get one. Get two. You will not be disappointed.
54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
Beginner's guide to adding a second hard drive
(5 out of 5) by Sandstone on May 3, 2009 (Salem, OR United States)This is for people (like me) who've never done this before... I use Windows Vista and an HP desktop computer.
1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn't come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn't seem noisy.
2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won't support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don't get this drive.
3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable - 4pin/2x15pin SATA - 12in. This is a "Y" adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn't have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.
4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of "rail" for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.
5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.
6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say "locating... installing" or something like that.
7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) - Manage - then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the "drive 1" (or whatever) designation to make it "online". Then right click the long color band over the drive's partition graphic and start the "new simple volume" wizard. Stayed with the defaults.
That's about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I've error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it's doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.
I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don't know if this is the same on other PC's) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn't. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)
This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!
1. Ordered this drive, which arrived promptly. Drive was well packed with foam. As expected, it didn't come with anything else. It works fine, and to me it doesn't seem noisy.
2. Ordered Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches). Note: older computers won't support SATA. If you have a newer computer, it should work. SATA cables are red and about 1 cm wide, the older cables are about an inch wide and silvery. If your hard drive uses these, don't get this drive.
3. Ordered Tripp Lite P946-12I Serial ATA (SATA) Dual Power Adapter Cable - 4pin/2x15pin SATA - 12in. This is a "Y" adapter (optimistically planning for my next hard drive!), but a straight one would also work. I found out after it arrived I already had a SATA power adapter in my case. However, it wouldn't have reached with the available wiring length, so I still ended up using this.
4. In my case, the drive requires 4 screws to install it. These are short screws with large flat heads, the heads form a sort of "rail" for it to glide into the rack on. On opening my case, I realized that HP had thoughtfully provided extra screws for future upgrades! The drive does not come with screws.
5. Installed drive in rack, plugged in the two cables, no problem.
6. Get to Windows. Your new hardware icon should say "locating... installing" or something like that.
7. Go to Start-Computer (right click on Computer) - Manage - then to Disk Management. Find your new drive at the bottom of the screen, and click over the "drive 1" (or whatever) designation to make it "online". Then right click the long color band over the drive's partition graphic and start the "new simple volume" wizard. Stayed with the defaults.
That's about it, everything worked the first time. After the drive was up and running, I decided to error-check the drive from Windows Explorer (under the tools tab for drive). This gave the unexpected result of giving me a blank screen for several hours while it checked it. When I've error-checked drive c:\, my screen gives me information on what it's doing. This was just totally blank, which was disconcerting, but in a few hours it finished what it was doing and everything worked.
I also went into the BIOS on bootup (pressed F10 while booting, don't know if this is the same on other PC's) to see if I needed to do anything there, but I didn't. The new drive was already listed. I did get a new option on booting, to set up the drive in a RAID configuration, I left this alone. (non-RAID)
This is written to help first-timers like me. If any experienced computer folks want to comment and add pearls of wisdom feel free!
35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
Faster, slightly more "clatter"
(5 out of 5) by J. Poorman on Feb 4, 2009 (San Francisco, CA)I bought this drive for my Mac Pro (Mac Pros, at least when I bought mine 3 years ago came from Apple with WD 250 GB hard drives). I have installed about 10 WD drives, upgrading this time form the WD 500GB drives, and this drive with its 32MB cache is indeed a bit faster (10-20 percent) than the 500GB. The ONLY downside at all to this drive is that is a bit louder when the heads are seeking, with the drive seek "clatter" more noticeable than the previous 500GB Western Digitals I just replaced (I needed more storage). Not bad tho--it's just that my Mac Pro is absolutely silent and I notice the least little additional sound and never really heard the 500's, the 1TB I hear now--but don't get me wrong it's not bad and there certainly is no drive "whine" when idling--these are quite drives. I guess whizzing across 1TB of data is a little more strenuous on the heads. I have bought about 20 Western Digital drives since 2000 and not one has failed on me--unlike LaCie--ick.
55 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
Fast shipping, terrible packaging
(2 out of 5) by J. Padilla on Jun 28, 2009 (Austin Texas)Received hard drive in a very timely matter. The packaging was horrible ... only 2 airbags, one top of the drive the other on the side of the drive. Bottom of the drive was touching the box and the drive was sliding all over banging the 3 unprotected sides. WD specifies if approved packaging is not used then it will void the warranty. I seriously doubt this is approved packaging. I did not even try to use the drive, I immediately RMA'ed it back to amazon. Drives shipped in this manor do not last long. I usually buy from the egg place but according to their reviews they also ship with poor packaging and have constant DOA drives. I posted a "customer" image of what the packaging looked like.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Fast drive, tons of storage
(5 out of 5) by C. Longo on Feb 25, 2009 (New York, NY)The Caviar Black model of drives differ in three ways from Blue in three major ways:
1) 32MB buffer vs 16MB. This means the drive is overall faster because it can store more data in memory local to the drive. So if you access the same data frequently there is little or no drive access to get at the data.
2) Dual processors vs single. This will alleviate the load on your CPU as the drive itself has more processing power locally.
3) Five year warranty vs three. Five years is a lifetime in hardware. Basically, you're covered for longer than you will most likely use the drive.
The Caviar Black line comes in three four sizes; 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, and 500GB. The 1TB and 640GB are the fastest because they use a denser platter technology which allows the drive head to get at the data quicker. The 750GB and 500GB are no slouches though and the differences in speed will not be noticeable to most people under most real-world usage scenarios.
Caviar Black drives are the fastest affordable consumer drives available today. If you want faster you have to look that the VelociRaptor 10000RPM line of drives but expect to pay a lot more for a lot less storage.
I measured the speed of the 750GB model using the HD Tune utility and access time was a fast 12.5ms with less than 1% CPU usage on my 3.2Ghz Intel Quad Core setup. The drive runs cool at 32°C in my system and is quiet. Overall a great drive at a great price. You can't really go wrong.
1) 32MB buffer vs 16MB. This means the drive is overall faster because it can store more data in memory local to the drive. So if you access the same data frequently there is little or no drive access to get at the data.
2) Dual processors vs single. This will alleviate the load on your CPU as the drive itself has more processing power locally.
3) Five year warranty vs three. Five years is a lifetime in hardware. Basically, you're covered for longer than you will most likely use the drive.
The Caviar Black line comes in three four sizes; 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, and 500GB. The 1TB and 640GB are the fastest because they use a denser platter technology which allows the drive head to get at the data quicker. The 750GB and 500GB are no slouches though and the differences in speed will not be noticeable to most people under most real-world usage scenarios.
Caviar Black drives are the fastest affordable consumer drives available today. If you want faster you have to look that the VelociRaptor 10000RPM line of drives but expect to pay a lot more for a lot less storage.
I measured the speed of the 750GB model using the HD Tune utility and access time was a fast 12.5ms with less than 1% CPU usage on my 3.2Ghz Intel Quad Core setup. The drive runs cool at 32°C in my system and is quiet. Overall a great drive at a great price. You can't really go wrong.