WD_BLACK 8 TB HighPerformance 3.5" Internal Gaming Hard Drive, 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 GB/s, 256MB Cache

Like an idiot I dropped it of a desk and still works fine. Little bit of ticking, who knows how long it will last but been working for two years so far.

This is WD Black Range of HDD for PC's. The Black Range of HDD are the "full fat" versions of their drives for maximum performance. This means they run at full speed at 7200rpm and SATA-3 600MB/s. To help with performance the drive also has a 64MB cache. This is a good size drive for your expansion needs. 2TB (unformatted) will work under Windows 7 without any extra drivers or software. The drive formats to 1.81TB under Win7. The drive is well packaged. It comes factory sealed in an anti-static bag. The drive is then securely suspended inside a box. This box is then packaged in another box which has plenty of brown paper padding. So previous reports of bad packaging are not valid anymore. The drive itself is like any modern SATA drive in appearance so nothing new there. I am happy to report that the noise levels of the drive are quiet in my quiet PC case. It is no louder than my ultra quiet Samsungs. The official figure is 29dB(mean) for idle. This drive on my old system (SATA-2 300MB/s) gives me a max of about 168MB/s Read and 165.5MB/s Write. The drive comes with a 5 year warranty. Recommended.

I strongly recommend buying hard drives from western digital. I will not touch anything from Seagate as all 3 drives I ever bought from them failed within a year. I've had a WD blue drive that I extracted from it's MyBook casing for between 5-7 years and I have had no issues with it however I bought this new drive as it was getting full and it probably should die soon as it is getting old. Note: This drive is the 3rd in my computer that I use exclusively to hold games and as such is only active when gaming. The first thing I found is that the drive is a lot more noisy than my WD blue when in use. This is to be expected as the blue only runs at 5400rpm and the black is made for performance. I am not sure how much this drive has improved my gaming, some people will swear that you cannot run games off a 5400rpm drive as I did with my WD blue however I think I have noticed a slight improvement on loading times.

Performance wise this HDD is excellent and I use it to store all my Steam and Origin games but it can get rather noisy at times when in use, this noise does seem to have gotten quieter over time although I may have just got used to it. Packaging seemed somewhat lacking but the product wasn't damaged when I received it so I can't really complain about that. Would be a 5/5 if not for the noise in my otherwise quiet PC

Having the same issue as the reviewer below me. Will be sending this back as I have found no holes for my sata cable to "click" securely into place and after looking around, it definitely should have. Shame. As I know these are supposed to be really good for gaming/reliability - I'd think twice before ordering one (for now at least).

All good

Good quality Hard Drive for the price.

My Desktop currently has 5 WD 7200 2TB Black. I used to use Seagate (of similar spec but cheaper) but I had too many failures, including one that was nothing short of catastrophic. WD Black are fast, reliable and none have failed, despite some having been in there for years. This latest two went in quickly and easily, and were partitioned and ready to go in no time. Since then, no noticeable degradation in quality or speed. They can be a little noisy but my PC is pretty loud anyway. I am about to buy some more.