WD Blue 250 GB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, PATA, 8 MB Cache - WD2500AAJB

I purchased this hard drive to replace the 60GB hard drive in my HP Pavilion 742n purchased back in 2002. There was nothing wrong with the old hard drive and it had alot of free space left. The HP system recovery is on the D partition of the hard drive, and not on seperate CDs. If the hard drive did go South, I would have to purchase another operating system. I intended to install the WD hard drive and keep the old one as a back up in the event I needed to re-install the operating system.As stated, this is a bulk OEM package. All you get is the hard drive, no cables or attaching screws.I've been in the computer case before to clean out the dust bunnies from the cooling fans, upgrade the memory, and replace the CD writer with a DVD burner. This seemed to be a little more involved and made me a little anxious. In the end, it turned out to be very easy.The ribbon cable connected to the hard drive had provisions to connect two devices. The connectors were clearly marked with "primary" and "slave." I left the jumper settings on both hard drives to "cable select" and connected the WD hard drive to the "slave" connector. There is a diagram printed on the hard drive showing the jumper settings for the different configurations. I did alot of research beforehand on cloning software and decided to just use the Acronis cloning software available from the WD website. The cloning software will only work if it detects a WD component. It was easy to use and pretty much self explanatory. Once the cloning was done, I removed the old hard drive and attached the WD hard drive to the primary connector.The computer booted right up without any problems. I decided to test out the HP system recovery (pressing F10 when you see the blue HP logo) and it didn't boot into the HP system recovery. It just rebooted back to Windows.From what I could determine, it has to do with the partition configuration, which I haven't quite figured out yet, and frankly don't have any plans to at this point.When you do a system recovery, the computer reverts to as it was out of the box, with all the annoying programs that it came with and none of the programs you installed. I have everything set up just like I want it on the old hard drive. If anything should happen, I can just use it to re-install everything.The hard drive is very quiet, in fact, I can't even hear it!All in all, I think this a great product at a very reasonable price and a great way to update an older computer.

I was looking to resurrect a security camera system that had multiple hard drive failures, but it was too expensive to replace the entire system, and was unable to replace just the computer due to proprietary hardware key to secure the system from unauthorized use. I knew there were limited options as everything has been leaning towards SATA or solid state, plus the company that built the system has since gone out of business, so I figured I'd take a gamble and try replacing the hard drives to get the system back up and running. Knowing that WD made reliable drives, we got the 160GB EIDE drive for the OS and 2 500GB slave drives for the DVR data. I've replaced several OS drives for desktops and laptops, and one of the cool tools you can get from the WD website is Acronis WD Edition, which allows you (with a USB to IDE/SATA cable) to clone your boot drive, and then just replace the old/full/defective drive with the new drive once the cloning process is complete. It's a free download from WD as long as you had a WD drive connected to the computer at the time of install. Given my situation, I also opted for the full Acronis disk management software which was only $50.00, as I had to format everything to work with Win98/FAT 32.With the successful clone/format/install, the security system is back up and running considerable faster, exponentially quieter, and all within a relatively small budget. I've never had any problems with WD internal or external drives, and would recommend them to anyone looking to replace an existing drive, or add additional storage.

I bought this drive to replace another that failed. I back up my wife's system using xxclone, a free application that clones an entire disk, warts and all. You can either clone disk A to disk B then run off B while keeping A as a backup, or run off A and keep B as a backup until you clone again. The clone disk is a complete, bootable replacement for the original disk (except that Windows could possibly and unhelpfully complain. In my experience, changing only the disk but not the disk ID, a feature of xxclone, is tolerated by Windows XP Pro.) I would think that Microsoft could now send out an update to XP systems that would allow easy clone backup of XP systems, seeing as how they have since gone through Vista (with great pain) and 7, but they seem to want to perpetuate the pain of backing up an entire hard drive in case it fails totally -- which seems to be the common mode. They want you to re-install every app and every update -- not customer friendly at all.Sure, the disk is old school, and so is my wife's computer, but it functions well enough for email and occasional word processing. Still, there are things on her computer that would be a pain to lose. Solution: clone the disk to another IDE disk using xxclone every few months.Having used Linux/Ubuntu on other systems, I'll never buy another Microsoft or Apple system again; most people would never notice the difference except for the lack of headaches and cost. But for now, it's great to have available a quality hard drive to back up a legacy computer -- at least until the motherboard fails.

Hi all, I bought one of these after reading all the reviews, seemed like a good buy, but....The drive is sold as 250gb, eide/pata, it is a 150gb drive with a 127gb capacity.On registering the product with Western, their system shows it as 320gb SATAII.There is no warranty on these drives as they come up as 'out of area'On querying all this Western have traced the original supply to APAC which is in Uganda, hence no warranty.Investigation ongoing with myself and the seller, with Amazon and with Western Digital.The drive does work fine, but that's hardly the point.I will revise or update this review when I have heard back so in the meantime, buy with extreme caution.Heard back from Western Digital, they are sure what has happened with this drive, it was sold into APAC, Uganda, there they take a lesser drive, smaller drive in my case and put that into the case, then they take a label from a 250gb drive, copy it and stick it on this African frankenstein drive and 100's of others no doubt, no warranty, no genuine drive, robbed.Mailed supplier today, Digital Components Ltd (dclstore), no response as yet.They have now sent RMA and taken the drive back for refund, very apologetic and professional to deal with, unlike Marius below.I would suggest anyone wanting one of these drives, ask the seller to open it and check on Western Digitals website that the drive size matches their database, then when you get it check the size of the drive on your system, if it all adds up it should be genuine, if they check on the WD database and their 250gb drive is listed as 320gb, and on a system it shows as 150gb, it's a fake.I then bought another one off here, registers as it should at 250gb, I've found out the 127gb limit is down to windows xp so ignore that part, but this new drive although it checks out and has warranty, the 3 year warranty is only in fact 155 days! I have escalated that to see if they will increase the warranty, weeks I have been waiting for that, if not this new one has to go back too, I have wasted hours and hours, or should I say days and days, to get to this point, where I may even have to start all over again, better to buy direct and it's cheaper, if only WD store had these blasted type drives in stock!!!!This second drive I bought off seller called Marius, I have told him about the warranty issue and he is emigrating and not his problem apparently, do not buy off that seller, I gave him good feedback about delivery etc but his customer service is diabolical.Week or so later, thankfully Western Digital have extended the warranty, all the seller has done is let rip into me that he sold me a drive with none of the warranty as advertised, how dare I contact him about it! the drive works fine though so after giving one star after receiving a fake drive or a drive where the details do not add up, to a second drive that had little warranty I will now up the stars although this whole process with the amount of time used I could of bought a brand new pc with a much better, larger drive in it, for much less!!!!

Two of my PC desktop computers, about 7 years old, recently developed starting and freezing problems with their 80G hard drives. I have now bought two of these Western Digitals to replace them and so far am delighted with their performance and quiet running. Initialising and formatting them before use was easy and trouble-free.Note I bought this Caviar because it is equipped for running with the traditional wide PATA information cable. Not long ago Hard Drives of this sort of storage capacity were much more expensive, so this represents great value for money.

Unfortunately, have to return this. Managed to install o.s., but when first in use, produced continuious high "beep" from the pc. Thinking it might be a problem on one pc I tried using it on another - in an external caddy - with same result, though everything else worked ok. Grateful for very prompt response from Amazon and have requested refund.

New hard disk for my 6 year old Notebook as the original just did not provide sufficient space for all my photo's etc.Installed 8 months ago and is working fine, no problems. The higher spin speed (7200 vs 5600) and the larger onboard cache (8MB vs 4MB) have between them speeded up Windows nicely as a by-product. Windows was taking about 6 mins to startup and is now taking about 2 mins - big improvement.

WD Caviar blue - I ordered this drive for a replacement for my CCTV system as original had failed, I had tried some Htachi drives but these were too noisyDelivered early, I was a little apprehensive initially as the drive wasn't a WD 250GB caviar blue as I was expecting but a WD caviar SE. Needn't have worried - performs just as well as the original - virtually silent.