Hard Drives on Sale

As a computer technician this is the MOST REPLACED DRIVE. The seller isn't the problem here, it's the hard drive itself.

The drive will work for some time, usually between 1 to 3 years. However, after that period there is a failure that occurs in the IDE controller circuitry for the drive causing a massive failure.

Symptoms are occasional unexpected and often sudden mis-mapping of the drive within the BIOS settings leading to an unrecognized drive or missing drive, file size reporting errors, random instability of the drive's operation on various OS's, and files that aren't readable while in operation.

Once the drive completely fails all files are usually lost.

Users should carefully look into newer drives by Western Digital and choose a drive compatible to your OS. In addition, those who have the WD400BB should consider moving important files to another drive and exchange this drive for another. Pricing is comparable and... Read more

This drive kept me happy for four years. Yesterday, while the computer wasn't being used, I came home to find the blue screen of death; corrupt partition table. Attempted to repair it, only to reboot to the ominous "click click click" referenced at several places that offer to retrieve your data for $850 or so. I'm happy I make backups. (The drive can not be repaired - it's toast. Only physical repair will allow retrieval of the data.)

Four years may seem like a long time, but catastrophic failures like this seem common with these drives at around this age point, and they make saving a few bucks on the front end less than worthwhile.

This is the second Western Digital drive I've had fail on me. (The first one came installed in an IBM laptop.) Maybe I keep my computers too long. Maybe I should have drawn a conclusion from the first one. I've certainly drawn it now.

This Western Digital HD fulfilled my need for a new HD for an old computer. It was easy to use and also easy to clone the old HD to this new one. I give it 5 stars.