Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD5000AAKS

At 500GB this is a reasonably large capacity drive by today's standards, yet very low-priced, about 10 cents/GB including shipping. Though they're always 500GB with a 16MB cache there have been several generations of the WD5000AAKS originally with more platters. Recently the WD5000AAKS drives I've received are single-platter which lowers the weight, noise, heat and power consumption slightly. Sustained sequential read throughput now seems to be upwards of 120MB/sec (maybe 10-15% higher than the last two-platter version) and is basically the same as the Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB drive. As it should though, the Caviar Black outperforms the Blue on random access. These are so cheap now that it's easy to justify running extra drives so that you have a backup.

This hard-drive works so fast! I'm am very pleased in buying it. Works fine so far, no problems, and I have been using it for 1 month now. If you need more space but decently fast this is the hard drive to get. For you gamers, works fine with all my games (team fortress 2, Borderlands, Dawn of war 2, Street fighter, everything).

Installed the HD and it works so far. Not really too much more to say unless it crashes

Cons: This is the second WD Hard Drive to die after just one month of operation. It cost us $155 to have a Tech shop interpret the error codes from the "Blue Screen of Death," to determine that the problem was a defective one month old Western Digital Hard Drive. Model: WD Caviar Blue

We had to pay WD are own shipping charges to return WD's defective Hard Drive + the $155 Tech shop repair bill for their analysis of the Hard Drive error codes that came up on the Blue Screen of Death Screen.

Other Thoughts: We realize that no Hard Drive company's product is perfect. But, after this second bad experience with this model of Western Digital Hard Drive, we are going to try our luck with a different manufacturer's Hard Drive.

Since the Western Digital Hard Drive is defective, we should not have to pay WD to return their defective product. WD should have a policy to compensate all shipping charges, once they are able to verify that their Hard Drive is indeed defective.

Yes sata II has a transfer rate of 6 gb/sec however unless you have an ssd hard drive it wont transfer faster than 1gb/sec and original sata is 3gb/sec. so dont think it will make a difference on a mechanical hard drive

Amazon shipped this hard drive as if it were not a sensitive computer accessory. Airbags were half inflated, some not inflated at all. Box containing hard drive was directly at the bottom with no proctection under it and able to move from side to side, only had 'protection' at the top. I sent it back, didn't want to even test the hard drive. Even if it worked, it would probably malfunction a lot quicker than it would have if it were packaged correctly.

I typically look for the Western Digital brand when purchasing a hard drive. I've never had one fail on me yet (knock on wood). The install went without a hitch. The drive is whisper quiet. I'll always come back to WD!

CAUTION: This is a 3.5" drive - NOT a 2.5" laptop drive. It appeared in my search for "2.5 sata drive 7200" so I ordered it hastily. Amazon was very good about the return, even paying the return postage. So no harm, no foul; Amazon is still great in every way except indexing listings for search. :-)

Bought this drive as a replacement for a drive that failed. Actually placed the order the same day that I submitted the RMA request to WD for the failed drives. I think I got the replacement for the failed one before the one from Amazon showed up. I knew I would end up with an additional drive, I just didn't expect WD to react so fast.

This drive will now start out in my new NAS.... life is good.

I ordered two of these drives along with an enclosure that was supposed to provide RAID 0/1 functionality. These drives are excellent, but unfortunately the enclosure would not work properly on my Windows 7 box; the RAID 0/1 functionality did not work.

I returned both the disk drives and the enclosure. Amazon made the process very easy, and gave me no trouble whatsoever about returning these items. Amazon is the greatest! They have earned my loyalty!

Got this on the 7th of Jan, and it worked great. Today is now the 27th of Feb and after 5hours of investigating what was causing repeated lockups and frequent freezes on my OS, the culprit reared it's ugly head to be THIS hard drive. I don't know what caused it's now deteriorating health but I'm now on the risk of losing +400gb of important data. I enjoy these exciting times of my life.. If you want to take the chance on the HD good luck.

This is an excellent drive. Extremely quite. Fast drive, but not quite as fast as the Seagate 7200.12. Compare prices with the Seagate. You can't go wrong with either.

Just because a hard drive (Western Digital Caviar Blue 320 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive)is capable of handling high G's is no reason to ship it without cushioning! The drive came in a well-packaged brown box, but had no cushioning inside - none, nada, zip, zilch!! The outside box outside did not say fragile either.
I suppose it should not be unsafe to rely on this hard drive to store your precious data since shippers will have given the package TLC in its handling of this package. It's not like they throw packages around!

This is the noisiest HD I have ever had the misfortune to own. Sometimes it sounds like it might just explode.

Perfect price & size for a system drive, it is stable & quiet, I had no problems so far. It's a OEM drive, so don't expect it to come with instructions or cables at all, that's one of the reasons why it has such a fair price.

Reason for 4 stars is because it could be faster, but it has a very reasonable speed, I certainly recommend it.

no problems with it.

Good product for the price.

I recommend it.

Great Bang for you Buck. I've had no trouble since purchase, everything is working great.

I used this for a replacement to a Iomega external drive.
It was a snap, works like a charm. Reformated to use on iMac.

I've tried many HDD brands and I'm partial to WD drives. I've never had any problems with any of them. I still have an old 80 GB EIDE drive until I ran out of room for it and it's several years old. No bad sectors and never a problem. Only retired due to size. This drive is performing as expected. Easy install, no problems. Using it as my primary, multi-boot OS drive. Pretty quiet and would recommend Caviars to anyone.

everything came as listed. the drive fired right up. i have been using it for a month now and everythings great...would recommend.

If you don't know what OEM is, it stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. In laymen's terms it means that you are buying something that is designed to just be installed in a computer, likely as a replacement for failed hardware. That also means you won't get ANY accessories with this; no cables, no screws, nothing. If you understand that then this is a good deal. HOWEVER...be careful buying OEMs from Amazon. As a side note, I bought this to offload significant amounts of data from my primary drive, for archival purposes. I can live without the bulk of it, but a lot of it is irreplaceable and I would really rather not lose it.

Most big name stores do not sell OEM parts. Places like Fry's do because they're effectively giant warehouses full of overstock. Amazon will sell you OEM, but their packaging leaves a LOT to be desired. In the case of a hard drive, they are considered fragile as evident by all labeling on the drive itself; Amazon will not mark it as fragile on the box. That means UPS or FedEx or whoever is going to toss that box around like it's nothing. Normally this wouldn't be an issue for a properly packaged item...popcorn or bubble wrap or inflated pillows, but Amazon just had this sandwiched, in its electrostatic bag, between two plastic holders and directly placed into the box. No type of cushioning whatsoever, and it was not marked fragile. That was my first concern.

When I got it home I proceeded to run Disk Management from Windows 7 to set up the volume and do a full format. It took two hours to fail at 8% and defaulted back to RAW; from that point I could no longer access it from Disk Management or CHKDSK. Bad sign - usually means there's something wrong with a sector or even a platter. I had to download a program, Partition Wizard, which after some plugging and unplugging was able to find the drive, format it and set it up. Partition Wizard did the full format in a matter of 1 minute. I ran a surface test to make sure there were no additional errors and didn't find any. Instead of fully moving the data, I copied what was there over to the drive and then I've been moving some additional stuff that was never properly archived. Reads work fine, and writes are fast over USB/eSATA bridge, but I still worry about what might have gotten messed up over the shipment. I'm going to just use it for a few months repeatedly, accessing the data and see if there are any issues, if not then I'll call it safe.

Just be forewarned about Amazon's shipping methods with an OEM device like a hard drive that is sensitive to sudden shock and motion. The drive itself is solid, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about shipping it properly.

This is an OEM drive so expect that it does not come with a data cable, power cable or screws. Most of these items usually come with other parts anyway, like data cables with a motherboard, power cables as part of a power supply and screws as part of a computer case. If not, they are very cheap to purchase. Software isn't necessary because all the necessary drivers came with the motherboard for the onboard SATA chipset or with the controller card. This is truly plug and play. Plug in the cables, screw the drive into the case, boot up your OS and configure/format the drive. You also don't need a cardboard box.

Right now 320GB really the best value for the smaller size drives you can buy. It really doesn't make sense to spend a few dollars less and get half the space. This drive and it's brother the WD3200AAJS are nearly identical the only difference being in the size of the cache (8MB for AAJS vs 16MB for AAKS). Whichever one is on sale is the one to get. I found a sale and got it cheaper than the version with the smaller cache so that is the one I chose. Before that I chose the WD32000AAJS. I notice no difference in peformance despite the different cache sizes. They are both very fast.

The drive runs cool and quiet. It's nearly impossible to hear when mounted correctly in a quality PC case. I am using this drive in a new home theater PC that I built so quiet is very important. It's nothing like the drive that sits in my Comcast DVR that rattles away 24/7. This drive has plenty of room for Windows 7 and whatever applications I'll install now and in the future. I keep all my media on a separate server so there's no worries about running out of space. It also runs very cool according to the temperature sensor in the BIOS. That's also very important in the confined space of a home theater PC installed in a media cabinet.

I've found WD drives to be very reliable and I hope this drive is no exception. So far, so good.

The first HD that I received ended up being defective. Other than that, it was easy to setup on my Dell Inspiron Desktop. It was a very simple plug and play since I was replacing a hard drive that went bad.

easy to install. received quickly so that I could replace my crashed hard drive.

Vantec NexStar 3 NST-360SU-BK 3.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 and eSATA External Hard Drive Enclosure (Onyx Black)
Works as expected. Quite. Heat and vibration have not been a problem. These bulk/OEM drives are perfect for enclosures. I used the linked case and it works great. Don't need any cables, screws or jumpers with an enclosure. Cheaper than buying an external hard drive plus gives me the flexibility to use the enclosure with other drives or install this one in another machine. I like it!

A two thumbs up for the price, performance, and to the company. =)Works great on my desktop that I'm in the process of upgrading gradually.

Keep in mind, this replaces the WD5000KS which had some errors (I hear).

I got this drive as a gift & it's great.
Installing this drive either as an external drive or your main drive was as easy as replacing any other drive. Do keep in mind this isn't a "retail boxed" drive. It's just the drive (this is where the "savings" come in).

Mostly because of my OS (I am using XPSP-2), I had to install this as an IDE, but I'm not ready to go to 64 bit processing as yet. Only because of the plethora of games & software that I like to use.

No problems with this drive. I have been using WD drives exclusively for many, many years. They are a bit more in price, but are made solid. This isn't to say they won't go south like every company seems to have. I have drive over 10 years old that work fine. Which is a nice investment.
You can scour the internet & find may deals on many drives. The features to look at are: RPM, Cache & size. Give up any for whatever you deem important. WD uses three levels on their drives currently. Green, blue & black. This one is blue, so it's fast & spins down quickly to save energy.


If you have the computer to handle it, this drive will run games very quickly via USB. Not all drives do, nor do all computers have the power to let them. This one didn't even blink.
Hope you have fun with it.

I used this drive as an external backup inside a Star Tech USB enclosure. After backing up files, installing UBUNTU (just in case my main drive failed I could boot this one up and have access to my files) and after spending a long time organizing those files, I set it aside. I should say it lasted less than three weeks because I barely used it at all after doing the backups. Three weeks later I went to do some more backups and the drive was no longer recognized. I tried plugging it into a different computer - no luck. I put different hard drives into the enclosure and they read just fine. At one point it did read for about 2 minutes and then went dead again. This is the second 500gig drive that died on me this year (the other was a Seagate). I'm awaiting a new drive, but I don't have very high hopes.

I have had many drives, but wd is for me the most reliable.
Quiet, not as fast as my other drives, but there is a lot more storeage
capability at 1/3rd the price of the other drives.

As is usual with Western Digital products, this is an excellent hard drive. I use this in my D-Link NAS-323 backup device, and it works great.
It's a no frills drive, but is fast and would be a great purchase for anyone looking for a new SATA hard drive.

Be sure to register the drive at Western Digital's website, so you can take advantage of the warranty and software options(you can download utilities and backup software from their site, for free).

This drive is very quick. Windows 7 boots very quickly and tasks are executed promptly. This stomps my old first generation raptor to the ground. Read and Write speeds average around 100MBps, with peaks in the 130's.

320GB per platter means faster than 250GB platter drives because of higher density. More data is squeezed into the same space therefore the heads don't have to travel as far when seeking and accessing.

These 320GB per platter Western Digital drives and the new 500GB per platter Samsung F3 series are the only drives I'd buy at the moment.

Good stuff. For any moderate to high demanding system though I'd always recommend at least two drives. The operating systems needs a dedicated drive all to itself, and your files need their own drive or drives. Working in this way makes leaps and bounds in performance difference even if it's just using two standalone HDD's without any kind of raid. This matters mostly of course if you have very many files, (pics, videos, music, etc.)

Great quality and A+ for western digital.

Never buy Maxtor which fails quite a bit. Western Digital has been very reliable. I use this one at work in my file server for ghost imaging. great product. highly recommended.

I put two of these in my D-Link 323 for a NAS. They are configured RAID 1. Nothing eventful to say about them. They work great so far. I'll be sure to update if they fail.

Great value, whisper quiet, delivered quickly and as represented. No retail packaging, which is just fine by me. Bought to replace 160 Hitachi that failed in under 2 years of light use! I have also had issues with Seagate. Always by WD! Not one failure of 7 WD drives over the years.

A hard drive is a simple, basic computer component; it either works or it doesn't. I bought a matched pair of these for a NAS/RAID I put together for a client. One of the drives was DOA. I contacted the vendor and never even received a reply. I will never purchase from "Sidian" again. However, I contacted Western Digital directly and they promptly issued an RMA and we affected the exchange simply and quickly. The replacement arrived and there were no further problems. So, my review is this: Sidian as a vendor is on my "do not use" list; Western Digital hard drives I recommend and will buy again.

I ordred 4 WD5000AAKS. I got three 500Gig drives and 1 250Gig drive, all with the AAKS label. I didn't know that was possible but it is. I was trying to build a RAID 10 and 3 500 Gig drive with 1 250Gig drive won't cut it. I had another AAKS 500 Gig drive and used that and the computers done. I still have the little drive somewhere.

I ordered this hard drive twice. The first time I was sent the wrong drive. It was for a laptop computer. It just so happened that it worked in my laptop so I kept it and reordered. The seconed time I did for a fact receibe the correct part that I ordered. I guess mistakes happen. All in all, I did use both hard drives.

I stopped buying bare drives from Newegg because they had poor packaging. Now it is time to do the same from Amazon.

The drive was put in a box with two sheets of bubble wrap. The drive was not wrapped in the bubble wrap. The drive was not suspended in inserts to keep it from being banged around.

Worse, the two short sheets of bubble wrap put into the box were completely deflated. Not one bubble had any air left in it.

So, essentially, this drive was unprotected, just banging around in the box while it was being shipped.

No brainer installation, but if you need help, WD is there for you on the internet. Item was well protected for shipping.

This unit was intended as storage as part of a NAS system. The unit formatted and worked as expected. The only noticeable distraction is the the hard disc seems to whine while in use. This wasn't a problem for my application as the NAS unit is located where the whine cannot be heard.

This drive was bought as a replacement for my wife's computer, whose drive was totally fried. I should have known more before ordering and installing the drive myself. I was not aware enough of the difference between IDE and SATA, so I ordered a SATA drive for a computer with an IDE motherboard. This required adapters to make the new drive work. Once the adapters were installed (correctly, because I made a couple of mistakes along the way) I got it up and running, with the help of our son-in-law. Getting Windows re-installed also was no picnic, even though we had the disk for it, since it did not include ANY drivers for anything. The drive now works fine, and I stress that the problems I had were not due to the drive, which now functions beautifully, giving my wife more storage space than she will ever use.

Having suffered with a measly 40-gig hard drive for the past year, I finally got around to ordering a new one. This solved the problem perfectly. The OEM version (this one) doesn't come with mounting equipment or a cable, but it's very clear that this is the case and I can't complain if they tell you up-front.

Mounting it was simplicity itself, and it has worked flawlessly since. It's very fast and completely silent, and I have noticed no increase in my system operating temperature (I have a Dell Optiplex case).

5 stars, highly recommended.

My laptop says ATA device..........it does not say 1 ATA nor 11 ATA//////////although it has the number of it......WDC WD800BEVS-22RST0 ATA Device pls help!!!!!email me [...]

This hard drive seems to be reliable than the other one I have 2 years ago but only time will tell... so far so good...

He comprado varios de estos dicos para mi y para amigos, todos estamos muy complacidos por el producto y por el precio....se lo recomendamos !!!

This is a reasonably fast drive, has been reliable, and just works. It seems to me that a middle-of-the-road hard drive is at its best when does what it's supposed to. This drive seems to do just that.

I bought this hard drive to bring resucitate an old workstation that had died on me. 250GB was the biggest drive the Bios and motherboard supported, so I bought this drive.

Had this plugged in and running in 5 minutes (it comes in an OEM package, that means no fancy retail box, cables, or instructions). That's ok, I didn't need that. I plugged this sucker in and was up and running installing Windows 7Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade in 5 minutes.

First and biggest thing I noticed about this hard drive is how quiet the drive is when compared to the old hard drive. That's the biggest difference I noticed.

Overall, I swear by Western Digital drives. They're workhorses.

Just FYI Western Digital has scales of Hard drives

Black - Highest Performance Drives
Blue - Midrange workhorse drives
Green - Lower power consumption drives

You can choose what you need.

Bought it for a build. Attached it using the cable (that came with Motherboard). BIOS recognized it first time. Installed Win 7 (RC) on it and was up and running within 2 hours. No issues.
The only issue is that Windows 7 rates it at 5.7 (and its the slowest rating on my machine).

I got this on some kind of fire sale for about an hour where the 640gb blue was on sale for 38 dollars and free shipping. As far as I can tell it works great (I put in in the gfs computer as the main drive using Arconis true image).

If its ridiculously on sale buy it, if not the egg has better deals on harddrives

I installed this hard drive into my new Q-see DVR. A great combo and value. Easy to install and format.