This is a great hard drive for realtime SD video capture. It maintains proper write cache operation on both legacy SATA2 and 6 mb/s controllers. This has been a problem for us with some, more modern drives. Their write speed often drops when used on on older controllers or docking systems.

Exactly what I ordered! No bad blocks, no strange noises, new an fully functional!!

New WD drives arrived well packaged from GoHardDrive. I low level formatted in Win10, then used WD's Data Lifeguard to do a full sector scan. Rebuilt my RAID array and did a verify. No strange noises, no bad blocks, no problems whatsoever. Happy enough so I just ordered 6 more drives, from Go of course. Note: these are OEM drives, so WD will not warranty them, but I got quick responses when calling GoHardDrive and was assured that they would honor the warranty themselves. WD factory warranty isn't all that great anyway, WD will replace a failed drive with 4 years left on the warranty with a drive with a very small (I forget, maybe it's just 90 days?) warranty. I had a replacement drive from WD fail very quickly, so I actually feel safer buying an OEM from ... MoreNew WD drives arrived well packaged from GoHardDrive. I low level formatted in Win10, then used WD's Data Lifeguard to do a full sector scan. Rebuilt my RAID array and did a verify. No strange noises, no bad blocks, no problems whatsoever. Happy enough so I just ordered 6 more drives, from Go of course. Note: these are OEM drives, so WD will not warranty them, but I got quick responses when calling GoHardDrive and was assured that they would honor the warranty themselves. WD factory warranty isn't all that great anyway, WD will replace a failed drive with 4 years left on the warranty with a drive with a very small (I forget, maybe it's just 90 days?) warranty. I had a replacement drive from WD fail very quickly, so I actually feel safer buying an OEM from GoHardDrive than a non-OEM drive where WD provides the 'warranty'.

Fast cool and loud...ish

I initially mounted this drive in one of my desktop machines as a data drive, just to mess around with it and to be honest didn't really notice much difference between it and my other HDs on that particular machine. Since that initial couple of days I moved the drive to a 6 core video editing and encoding machine on which I use Adobe CS6 amongst other things. This rig is used to encode and transcode HD video. The speed of the drive, while nowhere near a RAIDed setup, is certainly an improvement on what I’m used to. Throughput I found to hover around the 155MB/s mark for reads and about 135 MB/s for writes on a SATA III system, these measurements are from file transfers of files of the order of 6-10GB, which to be honest is the sort of file size I most often deal ... MoreI initially mounted this drive in one of my desktop machines as a data drive, just to mess around with it and to be honest didn't really notice much difference between it and my other HDs on that particular machine. Since that initial couple of days I moved the drive to a 6 core video editing and encoding machine on which I use Adobe CS6 amongst other things. This rig is used to encode and transcode HD video. The speed of the drive, while nowhere near a RAIDed setup, is certainly an improvement on what I’m used to. Throughput I found to hover around the 155MB/s mark for reads and about 135 MB/s for writes on a SATA III system, these measurements are from file transfers of files of the order of 6-10GB, which to be honest is the sort of file size I most often deal with on this particular machine. After a couple of hours of crunching video the drive’s temperature had risen to circa 95F. While the drive is installed in my video editing machine the drive is mounted in an AMS 4 in 3 module which has a fan passing air directly over the drive bays. These AMS modules, despite the fan, are not noted for keeping drives particularly cool so the WD was doing pretty well. As to noise well it reminded me a bit of the HD in my venerable Motorola DVR in the living room, quiet for most of the time until you write a large file to it, then you’re aware of it, not exactly loud but you can certainly hear it. With a 5 year warranty the drive is there for the long haul and I will be using it intensively for editing and rendering, as to the drive’s longevity, time can only tell. I think I'm giving this 4 eggs rather than 5, as to be honest the drive isn't giving me the 5 egg feeling. Generally a product of this type in this price bracket should be grabbing you by the throat and demanding 5 eggs, perhaps this one is too subtle for me. I'll report back in a few months and allow time to tell me if it is after all a 5 egger.

Gray Market - No Warranty

- I standardized on Western Digital about 10 years ago for all drives, using the RE drives for RAID and BLACK for everything else. - Unfortunately, I have had an over 10% failure rate on Western Digital Drives. - And, since some of the failed drives then subsequently failed, I have additional drives that I only got a 1 year warranty on, because Western Digital says that the replacement drives don't get to the full end of 5 years. - I have dozens and dozens of receipts for Drives, and it is impossible to keep track of this... so that is why I registered the two drives today right after buying... shocked to see the results. - I am going to move to a different brand for projects because the quality just isn't there. - On the plus side, I have done RMA's successfully on ... More- I standardized on Western Digital about 10 years ago for all drives, using the RE drives for RAID and BLACK for everything else. - Unfortunately, I have had an over 10% failure rate on Western Digital Drives. - And, since some of the failed drives then subsequently failed, I have additional drives that I only got a 1 year warranty on, because Western Digital says that the replacement drives don't get to the full end of 5 years. - I have dozens and dozens of receipts for Drives, and it is impossible to keep track of this... so that is why I registered the two drives today right after buying... shocked to see the results. - I am going to move to a different brand for projects because the quality just isn't there. - On the plus side, I have done RMA's successfully on more than 50% of the drives that have failed over the last 10 years.

Great price for a Western Digital RE drive. These are old-stock, OEM drives, so you can forget ab...

Great price for a Western Digital RE drive. These are old-stock, OEM drives, so you can forget about a warranty from Western Digital. But that is why they are priced so low. If you want a new drive warranty, pay twice the price for a new, retail drive. As a side note, I purchased four of these drives (exact same model) from a different seller and I received used drives, with nearly 30,000 hours on them. The SMART data on this drive showed nine hours of use, which is the time I put on it during formatting and checkout. This one was indeed a new, unused drive. For anyone purchasing bare drives, I recommend you download a copy of Crystal Disk Info and check the SMART data on the drive as soon as you get it. In the last year, I have purchase 15 ""new"" bare drives and ... MoreGreat price for a Western Digital RE drive. These are old-stock, OEM drives, so you can forget about a warranty from Western Digital. But that is why they are priced so low. If you want a new drive warranty, pay twice the price for a new, retail drive. As a side note, I purchased four of these drives (exact same model) from a different seller and I received used drives, with nearly 30,000 hours on them. The SMART data on this drive showed nine hours of use, which is the time I put on it during formatting and checkout. This one was indeed a new, unused drive. For anyone purchasing bare drives, I recommend you download a copy of Crystal Disk Info and check the SMART data on the drive as soon as you get it. In the last year, I have purchase 15 ""new"" bare drives and 11 of them turned out to be used, with anywhere from 900 to 30,000 hours of use.

I have read many of the comments on these reviews about the drives not being new. I just purchase...

I have read many of the comments on these reviews about the drives not being new. I just purchased 5 of these and although they appear to be new in the sealed static bag, they are very old. The dates on the drives are March of 2014. I checked the warranty status at WD and the warranty is still valid, but only until March of 2018, so just a few months left. Do NOT expect to get WD warranty on these drives. You should buy with the expectation you are getting no warranty at all, unless the seller is willing to honor the warranty for five years, which I highly doubt. That being said, these drives are pretty much bullet proof. I have many of them in operation for years without any issues, hence the reason I purchased more. I fully expect them to work without issues for ... MoreI have read many of the comments on these reviews about the drives not being new. I just purchased 5 of these and although they appear to be new in the sealed static bag, they are very old. The dates on the drives are March of 2014. I checked the warranty status at WD and the warranty is still valid, but only until March of 2018, so just a few months left. Do NOT expect to get WD warranty on these drives. You should buy with the expectation you are getting no warranty at all, unless the seller is willing to honor the warranty for five years, which I highly doubt. That being said, these drives are pretty much bullet proof. I have many of them in operation for years without any issues, hence the reason I purchased more. I fully expect them to work without issues for years to come, and do not expect any warranty, especially for the price they are selling for. I still have yet to run a SMART check on all drives to validate they are indeed new, but I am fairly certain at this point they are new, but very old. Buy them as throw a ways or don't buy them at all. UPDATE. I have installed 4 drives in a 4-Bay NAS. The are indeed all brand new, 0 hours of uptime reported by SMART for all drives. The 5th drive was purchased as a spare if needed. I will certainly burn them in for a while before using them, however the NAS I purchased has one dead NIC so I may be returning it, but thats another review ... went with QNAP, should have stuck with Netgear.

Purchased 2 of these drives on May 4, 2017 from DBSKY (Fulfilled by Home Essentials Direct). The ...

Purchased 2 of these drives on May 4, 2017 from DBSKY (Fulfilled by Home Essentials Direct). The drives themselves were new, wrapped and unused (SMART data shows Power On Hours and Cycles to be 1, so I'm the first one to spin these up). The drives themselves are old stock of course (Manufactured in 2011) since WD has long discontinued the RE4 series (current replacement is the WD Gold), but for a Dell R710 with a PERC 6i controller (who only does 3 GBit/s and up to 2 TB anyway), these are perfect. One thing is that the warranty may be expired - WD gives 5 years from manufacturing or initial sale to whoever they sell it to it seems, and with the drives I received being made in February 2011, that warranty expired in 2016. Haven't tried contacting WD to ask them if ... MorePurchased 2 of these drives on May 4, 2017 from DBSKY (Fulfilled by Home Essentials Direct). The drives themselves were new, wrapped and unused (SMART data shows Power On Hours and Cycles to be 1, so I'm the first one to spin these up). The drives themselves are old stock of course (Manufactured in 2011) since WD has long discontinued the RE4 series (current replacement is the WD Gold), but for a Dell R710 with a PERC 6i controller (who only does 3 GBit/s and up to 2 TB anyway), these are perfect. One thing is that the warranty may be expired - WD gives 5 years from manufacturing or initial sale to whoever they sell it to it seems, and with the drives I received being made in February 2011, that warranty expired in 2016. Haven't tried contacting WD to ask them if they'd honor a longer guarantee though. Edit: Asked WD, and they won't extend the warranty as these are OEM drives. So as of now, these drives come without warranty.

The gold standard for reliability; why you may need it

As a pc enthusiast and hardware buff for over twenty years my home is littered with *working* internal hard drives I've outgrown. Until the past few years I never had occasion to replace a dying drive, but times change. When I bought my first *1GB* (that's right, one gigabyte) drive in 1994 I thought it was a steal at $500. Back in the mid-90s a drive that large went for about $1/MB new but I was happy to buy the drive used. Back then most drives came with five year warranties and I never had one in active use for anything like that long and I never had one fail. Plus there was a lot of competition between (now long gone) companies like Connor, Quantum, Maxtor, and IBM along with Seagate and Western Digital. I welcomed affordable internal drives large enough to back ... MoreAs a pc enthusiast and hardware buff for over twenty years my home is littered with *working* internal hard drives I've outgrown. Until the past few years I never had occasion to replace a dying drive, but times change. When I bought my first *1GB* (that's right, one gigabyte) drive in 1994 I thought it was a steal at $500. Back in the mid-90s a drive that large went for about $1/MB new but I was happy to buy the drive used. Back then most drives came with five year warranties and I never had one in active use for anything like that long and I never had one fail. Plus there was a lot of competition between (now long gone) companies like Connor, Quantum, Maxtor, and IBM along with Seagate and Western Digital. I welcomed affordable internal drives large enough to back up my system partition and important documents. For years I was the only home user I knew that backed up to large capacity tapes, but the tapes and equipment were expensive and quirky and a restore took forever. Having a drive large enough and reliable enough to contain a couple of images of my startup drive meant I never had to reinstall Windows from scratch when an experiment went wrong. When USB 3.0 matured enough to make backing up to an external drive practical I bought a few. After all, everyone says you should be able to store your backup at a different site from your pc and as multimedia grew in size and quality being able to bring movies and music to a friend's home was appealing. The problem is, every external drive I've had (from different manufacturers) has had problems I never experienced with internal drives in the "good old days." Nowadays all drives are S.M.A.R.T. compliant and there are free tools like CrystalDiskInfo that will tell you if your drive is healthy or not. And believe me, you want to know. I've bought refurbished drives that had defective sectors out of the box and external drives with measly one year warranties that were on the verge of failure after 14 months. And even the external drives with healthy storage had interfaces that could not be counted on to mount first time every time. The extra circuitry between drive and pc was problematical. Sadly, I don't trust *any* of the four external drives I have now for the kind of reliable back up I require. Which is why if quality is important to you, and most especially the reliability of your backups, you'd do well to consider paying the premium for an enterprise drive even if you don't intend to build a redundant RAID array, which is their purpose by design. You benefit personally from the level of transparent quality you'd want out of your bank's servers. The WD RE is quiet, cool and the fastest spindle drive I've ever owned. Every once in a while it's nice to treat yourself to the best and just as you want your family in the safest car, ultimately the potential for failure in a commodity hard drive just isn't worth the potential pain.

WD 2 TB hard drive

I bought this drive to act as my second drive in a bee i7 PC I have built. WD has always been the most reliable dives I have ever used and Ive been building and using windows PCs since 1998. This drive is NOT slow by any means, just sometimes has a small delay when accessing data. When the drive arrived it did have a issue with the Recognition protocol, the PC would not show a drive letter. I tried to populate the drive, this didnt work. The computer recognised the drive in the device manager but you couldnt access it. To solve the issue I went to WD official website and downloaded their software. After downloading, I did a deep clean and reformat. I then used the software to assign the drive a letter and it was sorted. A little work but now the drive works fine. I ... MoreI bought this drive to act as my second drive in a bee i7 PC I have built. WD has always been the most reliable dives I have ever used and Ive been building and using windows PCs since 1998. This drive is NOT slow by any means, just sometimes has a small delay when accessing data. When the drive arrived it did have a issue with the Recognition protocol, the PC would not show a drive letter. I tried to populate the drive, this didnt work. The computer recognised the drive in the device manager but you couldnt access it. To solve the issue I went to WD official website and downloaded their software. After downloading, I did a deep clean and reformat. I then used the software to assign the drive a letter and it was sorted. A little work but now the drive works fine. I would always go with WEstern Digital drives. The drive could have benighted from having a Sata cable throw in and some placement screws, all in all a bargain for what I paid. How the info helps. Small techy issue but, nothing that could not be fixed with a little work

Would not recommend

Had issues from the start, kept doing windows repair boot-ups on a 1st-month fresh install of windows. Giving the benifit of the doubt it might be something else causing the issue... I did a fresh/clean install of windows that lasted a little longer before the same issues happened. So I went to WorstbuY and got a new drive to be sure it wasnt something else like bad memory chips and installed it and it's doing just fine months later. I will only buy Hdd or SSd's from Newegg or other real companies as I do not trust my personal info should a storage device fail and need to be returned. This is just my own opinion. My final rating is also based on the feedback I read on this, thinking I wouldn't have "thier" problems, I was wrong, I do not wish to comply with sending ... MoreHad issues from the start, kept doing windows repair boot-ups on a 1st-month fresh install of windows. Giving the benifit of the doubt it might be something else causing the issue... I did a fresh/clean install of windows that lasted a little longer before the same issues happened. So I went to WorstbuY and got a new drive to be sure it wasnt something else like bad memory chips and installed it and it's doing just fine months later. I will only buy Hdd or SSd's from Newegg or other real companies as I do not trust my personal info should a storage device fail and need to be returned. This is just my own opinion. My final rating is also based on the feedback I read on this, thinking I wouldn't have "thier" problems, I was wrong, I do not wish to comply with sending this back for refund or exchange so I will make it my own personal lesson. Good luck!