Western Digital Black - 3.5 inch 1TB Desktop SATA Hard Drive - OEM

Title : Western Digital Black - 3.5 inch 1TB Desktop SATA Hard Drive - OEM
ASIN : B0036Q7MV0
Description : Western Digital Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 35 Internal Hard drive SATA 6Gbs SATA 3 64MB Cache WD1002FAEX Components Internal Hard Drives
Features :

• Capacity:1 TB
• Height:2.5 cm
• Form Factor:3.5" x 1/3H
• Features:StableTrac, NoTouch ramp load technology, dual processor , S.M.A.R.T.
• Width:10.2 cm

List Price : £68.94
Price : £68.94


category: Products
brand: Western Digital
Item Page Detail URL : link
Rating : 4.3
Review : Good solid drive, medium noise level.
These are excellent drives in general. The prices have shot up lately (late October 2011) due to shortages in manufacturing capacity. If you can wait a month or two, do so. The drive is a bit noisy when loading a large number of files, or scanning the entire disk for a backup. Most of the time it's silent during normal use. The reliability of these has been great in the past, I expect this to be no different.

Note that different sellers are packaging these differently. Drives are extremely fragile and must be packaged well. Mine arrived and it appeared to have been packaged by wild apes. It was in an unsealed bubble envelope, placed in a paperboard box with one inflated and one deflated air cushion. It was rattling around loose and had damaged sectors on the first power up. The good news? These have a five-year guarantee that I will almost certainly be needing. I'll just keep on making regular backups.

##EDIT##
215 power cycles and only three months, and...