Amazon.com: Western Digital Refurbished: WD Caviar Green WD20EADS Hard Drive - 2TB - Internal - Bulk : Electronics

I have a total of seven of these drives. Two have failed within the first month of use, after I spent days migrating all of my data over to these new high-capacity drives. Both were connected externally via eSATA (externally rather than internally), but this may not necessarily be relevant because a cursory Google search on this issue led me to complaints by numerous other users who also have experienced failures with these drives. It seems that the "Green" feature involves more complicated mechanics and electronics in these units, which are a weak link and make the drives more susceptible to failure.I bought these because I have always understood Western Digital to be a top name in hard drives. I was also aware of the scandal with many of Seagate's high-capacity drives failing last year.So it seems that the top two names (in my opinion) of hard drive manufacturing have been having serious reliability issues with their high capacity drives. This is totally unacceptable and I have been losing (and continue to lose) countless hours of time having to research and buy NEW replacement drives, perform data migrations (which take around 24 hours each with these capacities), erasing old drives and dealing with returns to vendors like Amazon, etc. Thankfully Amazon and one other top vendor I use have issued me RMA's and free UPS return labels with ZERO hassle.I just purchased five of the new Hitachi 7200RPM internal 2TB drives and am again migrating all my data from the WD's to the Hitachis. I am not sure if the Hitachi's will prove any more reliable, but so far I have not seen any REPORTS of massive failures on these, so they seem like the best choice (gamble?) for me at the moment. The Hitachi drives are much louder (you can hear the really annoying "crunching" sound when the drives are writing data) but I'm at the end of my rope and will suffer through this in order to at least have a 2TB drive that I'm not terrified might CRASH at any moment causing me to lose a lifetime of accumulated data. They're currently a bit cheaper, too.So zero stars for Western Digital "Green" drives, but five stars for Amazon.com customer service.

I've been purchasing (1 & 2 TB) WD green drives through Amazon for some time now for my Drobos and have been very satisfied with their performance and speed. There is a slight performance hit if the drive is accessed when the drives have spun down but that's the whole point of the green drive is to save on power consumption while keeping the internal temp low.What forced me to provide this review was the poor packaging for this drive.This OEM drive is part of the Amazon Frustration Free packaging program. Every green drive I purchased in the past had the OEM drive in its anti-static wrap, wrapped in bubble wrap, then enclosed in a small box that is lined with egg crate foam. That box is then in another box with air pads. This was fine for me as there is very little free movement for the drive and I've had no physical problems with the drives.What's wrong now, and you'll find several reviews siting similar situations, is that there is no egg foam box. All it is is a small box, with two air pads, and the drive in a single layer bubble wrap. The drive is loose and free to bang up against the box. The box suffered a little damage on one corner, either due to having something heavy stacked or from a fall.I'm no expert -- maybe it's perfectly fine to ship it this way, but the tech geek in me is having a difficult time with this.The drive is going into the drobo, so if it does fail I'm not overly worried. If it does, it's difficult to ignore the poor packaging as having a hand in the cause.

This is a very fine disk drive from the highest quality drive maker. I bought 2 to hold my ever-growing load of photos and videos which had filled up a pair of 500 GB drives. The WD20EADS has huge capacity, it's quiet, it runs cool (so it should last longer) and most surprising, it's faster than my 500 GB drive. With the new drive, the time it takes to convert RAW photos to JPG format dropped by 12%. This is probably due to the large 32MB cache.Some things to watch out for:The great price on Amazon is partly because the drive is in OEM packaging, which means all you get is the drive - no cables, no instructions, no installation CD. Many vendors sell drives this way, this isn't anything unusual. If you have installed OEM drives before, then you know the routine and it's not a problem. If you need the instructions or installation software, you can download it from the Western Digital support site.If you are wanting to install this drive in an older motherboard - beware! It didn't work in my Gigabyte GA-7NNXP running F15 BIOS (latest) and Silicon Image firmware 4.2.00 (which is only 84 revs out of date and not upgradable). The BIOS hung during initialization of the Silicon Image SATA controller and there doesn't seem to be any workaround or update possible. On the other hand, it worked fine in my wife's Elite Group KT-600A motherboard, which is slightly older and less sophisticated than the Gigabyte board. The Gigabyte board was running 500 GB drives on the SATA ports without a problem, and there are no general size limitations between 500 GB and 2 TB. It appears that the BIOS is just buggy. The Western Digital support site has a list of tested compatible SATA controllers, so if your board is on that list you should be good to go. If your board isn't on the list, you might want to search the net for information on your particular board before you buy.