Western Digital 2TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EZBX

I gave this drive to someone as a gift, and they've been using it for backups for 10 months without issue.My review is based on another unit of this drive which I bought for myself some months later. I've been using it as my primary desktop OS/programs drive since 5/29/2014, so it's about 5 months now. There have been no problems thus far. It's really quite a bargain for desktop use if 1TB is all you need.The actual capacity of this drive is 931.5GB. That's an old marketing trick which can be blamed for the pointless redefinition of all our real, long established data measurements with those silly "i" characters. I won't dwell on it any further, but 931GB is the true capacity when measured in base 2, as all data is correctly measured.This 1TB Blue drive uses a single 1TB platter spinning at 7200rpm. There are 2 heads (each side is 500GB).A single platter design is usually better for reliability than having multiple smaller platters, because there are fewer points of failure, the assembly is lighter, the motor doesn't have to work as hard, and less heat is generated.Single platter drives will also tend to be quieter, but due to my configuration I can't judge the noise level.There has been much discussion and testing among users in online forums, including WD's forum, which repeatedly show that the 1TB Blue and 1TB Black perform the same. It appears the only benefit of the 1TB Black is a longer warranty. Some Blacks are faster than this drive, but the 1TB model is not.Compared to a Green, the Blue is faster owing to it's faster rotation speed. The Green drives also have an "intellipark" feature which causes them to keep parking the heads after a few seconds of inactivity. This can cause laggy response and extra wear. I dislike that design - I believe power management functions should be left under the control of the operating system, which can account for user preferences and what is happening in the rest of the system. Hardcoding this behavior into the drive is ridiculous, in my opinion. The Blue behaves the way I prefer - it does not use "intellipark", it stays ready to roll until directed otherwise through power management commands from the OS.I wish they were making the Blue series in larger sizes - it seems this 1TB is the end of the line. I don't care for the Greens and the Blacks are more expensive.Partition/Sector Alignment--------------------------------Please be aware that like most modern drives, this drive uses 4KB sectors (also known as "advanced format"). If you are using Windows 2003, Windows XP or older, as I am, don't let Windows handle the partitioning of this drive. This is even an issue on unpatched versions of Vista and Windows 7. These older versions of Windows will believe that the physical sectors are 512 bytes, when in reality they are 4KB. As a result, the partition(s) will not be aligned with the physical sectors. It will still work, but performance will be reduced.Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP and older do not have any update to fix this, but it's not a problem as long as you do the partitioning with a suitable 3rd party utility. I think Western Digital offers a tool for this, but I've never tried it. Once the partitions are set, it's fine to let Windows format them.For my Windows XP install, I used a recent version of GParted to partition the drive. GParted can be downloaded and burned to a bootable CD, or installed to a USB flash drive. Just use the option to align your partition(s) on 1MB boundaries. This is the easy way to ensure they are aligned correctly for the best performance. Then boot your WinXP install disc and let it format the partition that you already created. It sounds harder than it is, it's a minor hassle but it's simple.If you ever change the partitions, once again use GParted or a similar utility that handles alignment for modern hard disks. Don't use the built-in XP partitioning. But again, once the partitions are created, it's fine to let Windows format them.The built-in partitioning is fixed in Windows 8.According to Microsoft, it is fixed in Windows 7 after installing Service Pack 1 - you would need to have that service pack before partitioning the drive, not after.Again according to Microsoft, it is also fixed in Windows Vista *after* installing update MS KB 2553708 - I assume this is automatically installed for people who use automatic updates, but I don't know that for a fact. This won't do you any good if you're doing a fresh install and your install disc predates the required update.The partition alignment detail I've described above is an issue you will encounter with any recent hard drive, it's not unique to this model. If you ignore it, performance will be affected but it will still work. You may see Seagate drives implying that they are immune from this, but in reality, they are not. All modern "advanced format" drives, of any brand, will perform better if sectors are properly aligned. But it's not a big deal - just use a modern partitioning utility and then you're set.----------------------I just tested this drive using "Roadkil's Disk Speed" on Windows XP 32-bit. I'll cut out all the variables and just give the linear transfer results with large block sizes. My drive has a few partitions and there are lots of files on it, so this might affect results.First partition (first 20GB): 170-178MB/sec linear read3rd partition (physical location range is from 28-628GB): 153-177MB/sec linear readLast 300GB is unpartitioned so I can't test that range.I don't think the random access test is useful, because my partitioning greatly influences the result.There's a test mode for the whole physical disk, but it's results are too inconsistent.This drive is a great bargain if you just need a simple, inexpensive, well performing 7200rpm hard disk. I was tempted to try a Seagate SSHD, but I couldn't justify the cost compared to this. If I was shopping today, I'd look carefully at the HGST and Toshiba offerings as well, but from the WD side this is my pick for a general purpose 1TB desktop drive.Update: It is now 11/2015. This drive is in my desktop PC, used daily, and still works fine.Some months ago I ran a benchmark on this drive using the linux utility "gnome-disks". The random access performance measured out to a 15.7ms average. This is mediocre, but expected from a quiet drive. Screenshot is attached. It also shows the transfer rate across the disk (read test only, I didn't test writes).

Fired right up, but required some configuration by windows 11 before it was recognizable. I’m sure that is true for any new drive. I’m a novice so there was no fault with the drive. MS Copilot was helpful in giving me instructions how to set up.

Massive drive! Shipped very quickly. Easy install and working well so far

Never had trouble with WD drives and I've used this for months for data storage without fail and used WD for decades without troubles. As with all data storage you have to weigh your needs against price and I found the price compared to storage acceptable. If your working with older OS on older systems and need data storage space then this drive might be for you.

[ SEE UPDATE BELOW ]SUMMARY: (i) good performance as an external USB drive; (ii) internal temperature reaches the 95-105F range after several hours of use.REVIEWThere are more than enough reviews of this disk as an internal drive. My interest, however, was to use it as an _external USB drive_, and that is what this review focuses on.The 3.5" WD Blue 1TB hard disk drive (WDC WD10EZEX-08WN4A0), has attractive properties for storage purposes: a formatted capacity of ~954 GiB out of its nominal 976 GiB --usually described by manufacturers as 1000 GB--, a 7200 rpm rotation rate, a 64 MB cache, a SATA III interface with a 6GB/s speed, and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring.It is not the top of the line of Western Digital SATAs, at least in terms of the length of their limited warranty (3 years for the WD Blue versus 5 years for the Black, although there are claims of not too different benchmarks), but because of its relatively low price it has a 'drive value' index similar to the top non-SSDs. This makes the WD Blue 1TB a good choice as an external USB drive for the storage of media or data, in particular incremental backups (especially when disk writes caching is enabled), since top performance values are unrealistic for serving as a guide for external USB devices, where performance is primarily dictated by the USB specs and manufacturing compliance.The figure below shows results of a free benchmark app in wide use, Crystal DiskMark, for the Blue 1TB used as an external USB-3 storage drive (left table) and --to provide some perspective to these values-- for an internal SSD with a good performance as a system drive (right table) -- the latter, which was partitioned into two logical drives, has a capacity of 512 GB, and both devices are quite comparable in the fraction of used capacity, ca. 40%, which is important since performance declines as a drive gets full. The first line in both tables are the averages of sequential 5 reads and 5 writes with multiple queues and threads for a relatively large data block; this measures how quickly large files (e.g., backups or multimedia) can be read from or written to the drive. The second line are the averages of random 5 reads and 5 writes with multiple queues and threads for a small block; this measures how quickly many small files (e.g., when copying large app folders or loading programs during operating system startup) can be read from or written to the drive. The third and fourth lines mirror the above two but using only a single queue and thread. The lower performance of the Blue 1TB is only due in part to USB transfer issues; published data indicate that, if used as an internal drive, the values in the left table would have increased by less than two fold. Nevertheless, its performance is quite appropriate for external storage.I mounted the WD Blue 1TB vertically in a dual-bay USB3 docking station, and it is typically quiet but for some clicks when it starts spinning. A negative finding is its temperature after many hours of use: compared with a 2.5" WD Blue 500GB disk that warms up to about 24C (75F) in the second bay of the open docking station, the Blue 1TB gets hotter in the range of 35-40C. Temperature is often claimed to affect drive reliability (but see "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" by Pinheiro and co-workers, 2007), so I put close to the station a small USB fan with an adjustable speed set to a low value to keep it quiet, which brings the Blue 1TB temperature back to the below-30C range.UPDATE June 2017Used in a new Lenovo E560 has worked extremely well over the last 6 months. The only issue has been that Windows (7SP1 Pro 64x) failed to recognized the drive as ready in 2 or 3 occasions only, and offered to format it; so far, this has been solved simply by rebooting the laptop. (This is a known but rare quirk of the OS, usually --but not always-- fixed by running the command sfc/scannow as an administrator in the DOS box.)