Hard Drives on Sale

Short version: I installed this in my aluminum unibody MacBook. It works fine. I have oodles of free space. It's pretty quiet. At the time, I think it was the largest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook drive available.

Long version:
I didn't really want to upgrade my MacBook. I had plenty of room on the 500GB hard drive I had purchased just 6 months before, also a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, but something was wrong, and I didn't know what. My applications were stalling out after disk intensive operations. I tried re-installing OS X, rebuilding the Spotlight database, fixing permissions, everything and it still happened. So in desperation, I decided to upgrade my hard drive a little early, going up to this 640GB, even though it was the same brand that might have been failing me. And for whatever reason, it's worked reliably ever since.



Remember to de-authorize your iTunes account on the original drive before removing it, and do a final Time... Read more

QUICK EVALUATION

The Western Digital 640GB 2.5" SATA is a quiet, reliable, easy to install, drive.

The 2.5"/9.5mm SATAs easily and perfectly mount inside a PS3's or laptop's drive bay where they can replace the laptop's or the PS3's original 20-40-60-80-160GB drive or the new PS3 120GB SLIM's without voiding the warranty. Same should hold true for the upcoming PS3's 250GB model. The minor price difference between purchasing a 250GB Slim vs. upgrading an existing 120GB PS3 to 500GB or 640GB should make such an upgrade attractive to anyone who feels that 200-400GB of extra storage are needed.

At the time of this review, the 640GB does not offer the lowest cost per GB - that honor belongs to the 500GB model. I have little doubt that this is bound to change.



POSSIBLE USES

- Upgrade an existing laptop drive. I have upgraded mine from 60GB to a WD 500GB 2.5" SATA recently and I've been happy ever since... Read more

So far, so good with this giant upgrade for what used to be a 40 gig PS3. The upgrade, hardware wise, went off without any hitches. Popping out the original drive is a matter of having a philips head screwdriver handy, and there are no additional cables needed so this OEM drive worked fine. I cannot speak to its reliability yet since it's only been a few days, but there have been no perceived issues with the drive other than having a lot more space to work with.

A word of caution for those using external USB drives to back up the PS3:
I used a standard external USB hard drive to run the Backup application on my PS3, which worked as expected, backing up my mostly filled 40 GB original drive. After I installed the new drive, I was prompted to install the new Playstation OS to continue, and I used the same backup drive to provide the new OS file - DO NOT DO THIS! While this worked, when I walked through the setup, it managed to format my backup in addition to the... Read more