WD Blue 500GB 2.5-inch Internal Hard Drive

As expert using these HDDs, I have used many of these HDDs (like alot) so far. They have never failed me so far. They are great and reliable.All my customers are super happy.By end of the day, you should look at your requirements and choose your hardware as per your needs. I love them.

Below average consistency (According to a very popular user benchmark website) The range of score...

Below average consistency (According to a very popular user benchmark website) The range of scores (95th - 5th percentile) for the WD Blue 1TB average is 57.4% (the fastest mechanical drives being 100%). This is a relatively wide range which indicates that the WD Blue 1TB performs inconsistently under varying real world conditions. I've had good experiences with WD drives in the past, never have I had one fail on me to date, ever. That said, I do handle my tech with care. This led me to purchase 2 of these drives; both are running firmware ver. 01.01A01. They both look exactly the same and the manufacturers dates are only a few months apart. Trouble is one of them is waaaaay out performing the other one. Seq. read/write on the good one easily hits 120 mb/s (give or ... MoreBelow average consistency (According to a very popular user benchmark website) The range of scores (95th - 5th percentile) for the WD Blue 1TB average is 57.4% (the fastest mechanical drives being 100%). This is a relatively wide range which indicates that the WD Blue 1TB performs inconsistently under varying real world conditions. I've had good experiences with WD drives in the past, never have I had one fail on me to date, ever. That said, I do handle my tech with care. This led me to purchase 2 of these drives; both are running firmware ver. 01.01A01. They both look exactly the same and the manufacturers dates are only a few months apart. Trouble is one of them is waaaaay out performing the other one. Seq. read/write on the good one easily hits 120 mb/s (give or take 2 or 3 mb) on every benchmark, the other one I'm lucky if benchmark read/writes hit high 80 mb/s. At first I was troubled by the inconsistency and did everything I could think of to remedy it, new drivers, checked for new firmware, playing with AHCI/RAID etc settings in the bios, messing around with the write cache settings in device manager all to no avail. Come to find out this is typical of the WD Blue drives. So what I'm getting at here folks is, if you're not a lucky person then you'll likely be singing the blues if you buy this drive, pun intended. If you do decide to pull the trigger all I have to say is....GOOD LUCK!

FINALLY a thin version!

In all seriousness, I wish WD has made these available for sale like 2 moths earlier when I bought 5x 2TB Seagate FireCudas. The Seagate FireCuda has a slight edge on speed due to it being a SSHD, and has a much longer warranty, HOWEVER... I've had the Seagates for 2 months and have already had 2 failures. At the time WD only offered a 15mm thick PMR version (and with less cache). I'm very pleased that this drive is finally available as now I can have the vastly better reliability of WD. I can't wait until the capacity gets even better. Keep your data safe... buy WD. Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is, think of how shingles on a roof are laid out ... MoreIn all seriousness, I wish WD has made these available for sale like 2 moths earlier when I bought 5x 2TB Seagate FireCudas. The Seagate FireCuda has a slight edge on speed due to it being a SSHD, and has a much longer warranty, HOWEVER... I've had the Seagates for 2 months and have already had 2 failures. At the time WD only offered a 15mm thick PMR version (and with less cache). I'm very pleased that this drive is finally available as now I can have the vastly better reliability of WD. I can't wait until the capacity gets even better. Keep your data safe... buy WD. Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is, think of how shingles on a roof are laid out partially overlapping each other - that is how the data is laid out on the drive platters. While this allows significantly higher capacities, it creates some complexity to writing. If the drive needs to write data in the middle of existing data, it can't just "place" it there like a HDD using PMR technology because other data also overlaps it. What it has to do is put the data in a temporary location, then re-write all the shingled data afterwards to the end of the track break. What does this mean for you? No change really in the way you use it. Just be aware that writes to the drive place the data in a temporary position, which is then relocated and shingled later on. The drive is smart enough to do this when you aren't busy, but this will make the drive sound like it's doing a lot of work even when the computer is idle. So if you hear the drive churning away while you are seemingly doing nothing - this is completely normal on any drive using SMR. The constant busy sound is not a defect, but rather a side effect - and it stops when the shingling is complete. If you use this as a main system drive, there are so many random writes with the paging files and temp files that it may never fully shingle the drive, making it sound as if it never stops working. For that reason, these are best used as storage drives that are read to often, but written to rarely. Don't even think about using an SMR drive in a RAID setup as you'll get very poor performance.

Has the height of an 2'5" SSD (smaller than standard 2'5" HDD)

My enclosure could only support 2'5" SSD drives ( https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s1/product/retroflag-nespi-4-13802809 ), because standard 2'5" HDD are thicker in height than 2'5" SSD.This HDD has the height of an SSD , smaller in height than other HDDs, and therefore this HDD could fit in my enclosure without problem. As a result I could benefit from large capacity at low-cost price.

I’ve never ever changed a hard drive or done anything of that sort, but I have a mid 2010 13-inch...

I’ve never ever changed a hard drive or done anything of that sort, but I have a mid 2010 13-inch white Macbook that’s given me no problems at all except for the normal battery replacement. Obviously its a little old so its bound to get slow. And mine was.. insanely slow. Even after deleting most of my files, it was too slow. I looked into it and decided to buy a new hard drive. I did a little research and opted for this one. I wasnt 100% positive it would work for my computer, but luckily it did. I think as long as it was a 2.5 SATA it should be fine. Installing it was very easy, you just need the right screwdrivers (Phillips and torx T6). I struggled to install new software on it, tried many different ways but most of them didnt work. In the end I just bought a ... MoreI’ve never ever changed a hard drive or done anything of that sort, but I have a mid 2010 13-inch white Macbook that’s given me no problems at all except for the normal battery replacement. Obviously its a little old so its bound to get slow. And mine was.. insanely slow. Even after deleting most of my files, it was too slow. I looked into it and decided to buy a new hard drive. I did a little research and opted for this one. I wasnt 100% positive it would work for my computer, but luckily it did. I think as long as it was a 2.5 SATA it should be fine. Installing it was very easy, you just need the right screwdrivers (Phillips and torx T6). I struggled to install new software on it, tried many different ways but most of them didnt work. In the end I just bought a USB and created a bootable macOS installer and that did the trick. I now have a perfectly good laptop, as good as new, much much faster than it used to be and with much more space (original hard drive had only 250gb). Very happy with the outcome and if you have the same computer, I recommend this hard drive.

Okay Shingled Magnetic Drive

This HDD has preformed considerably better after buying an M.2 SSD as a boot and OS drive. Since only pictures, videos, games, documents and swap are on it the drive is accessed considerably less. Try and limit access and write to this drive as much as possible to make it tolerable. I really wish this drive was advertised as a shingled magnetic HDD so I knew what I was getting into before purchase. WD needs more R&D on this product. I don't know if it needs improved firmware, more cache or both.

Perfect second drive for tight space inside a NUC

I'm using it as the D drive in an Intel NUC, with Windows 10 installed on an SSD C drive. This WD Blue model is an SMR drive. I don't know that I would recommend it as a primary system drive but I have never tried that. I needed a high capacity low profile second drive. This one works great for that kind of usage.

Use these for a backup drive.

I've bought two of these so far and will purchase more, but I do not believe in consumer grade, rather, I use them as backup only drives, and I use them only because I can not get a WD black in 2 TB. Keep in mind two things, I've been a tech for over 40 years, and if there is a BETTER hard drive, I will pay the extra couple dollars for it rather than trying to save money by buying good enough, with hard drives, that does not exist. Second, I've had a brand new WD Black for laptop come bad in the box, so again, spend the money on better rather than recovery of data later. VERY IMPORTANT if the backup is going to be external (both of these were internal backups) I buy a laptop drive case and still buy these and mount them. I NEVER use a ready made external storage ... MoreI've bought two of these so far and will purchase more, but I do not believe in consumer grade, rather, I use them as backup only drives, and I use them only because I can not get a WD black in 2 TB. Keep in mind two things, I've been a tech for over 40 years, and if there is a BETTER hard drive, I will pay the extra couple dollars for it rather than trying to save money by buying good enough, with hard drives, that does not exist. Second, I've had a brand new WD Black for laptop come bad in the box, so again, spend the money on better rather than recovery of data later. VERY IMPORTANT if the backup is going to be external (both of these were internal backups) I buy a laptop drive case and still buy these and mount them. I NEVER use a ready made external storage drive for saving data, NEVER NEVER NEVER, as if they fail, the usb is part of the drive making recover far more expensive and difficult. Expect drives to fail, backup your data, and this is a good drive for that.

Very happy with these drives so far

I would absolutely recommend these drives for what I'm using them for, and I might buy another one to put in my netbook as well. I bought an 8 bay device that fits in a single 5 1/4 bay but the max drive height it can take is 7mm. I wanted huge volume of data, not speed. Despite only being 5400RPM these drives are pretty good due to the 128MB of cache. I've got 4 of these in a windows storage spaces "array". with the 8 bay adapter I have room to grow. These drives were the only non Seagate ones available in 2TB + 7MM factor. I have not had them long enough to say what their reliability is like yet. I bought these from Newegg instead of "The A word that Newegg wouldn't let me put here" since Newegg came in a little cheaper total price.

hdd in caddy not work

HelloI have a lenovo ideapad 110 15isk with wd5000lpcx hdd. I upgrade it with 250 gb ssd. I wanted to use hdd the 2nd drive in a caddy instead of odd. The bios detects it, but not in the windows. 2 piece hdd from another manufacturer (1.5 TB SATA3 and 250 GB SATA2) works properly. Why not works it in the wd5000lpcx caddy? What is the reason?