WD Blue 250GB Mobile Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM SATA 3 Gb/s 2.5 Inch – WD2500LPVT

Pros: Good storage for price.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I flashed this drive to use in my Xbox 360. I am very pleased with this drive.

Pros: Extremely thin – improved airflow/cooling

Cons: Extremely thin – may not insert right
Advanced Format Drive – BEWARE!!!

If you have not dealt with Advanced Format Drives (4k/sector) and you are buying a replacement drive for an older laptop – BEWARE!!!! They will work, but it can be an education getting them working. First, the drives are VERY thin. I installed it in the laptop carrier (it fit fine) and slid it in. It felt wrong – no resistance. BIOS showed no drive. Took me a day to figure the drive was ‘missing’ the SATA connectors inside, even with the carrier. Some pressure tilting downward and it slid in right. AFD drives are ‘supported’ in Vista and above, but not always natively. XP takes work. Cloning ‘works’ as does a recovery from DVD, but you have to run a tool called WD Align to fix the partitions. Windows version impossible to download even after registration. Had to use old CD ISO. Clone still was messed up – so I installed from recovery. Still had to WD Align. Got it to boot. But then Windows would not update

Overall Review: I got – no joke – a ‘Catastrophic Failure 0x8000fff’ from Windows Update. WD had mentioned you needed Intel Matrix drivers 9.6 or higher. Turns out the lack of driver support for AFD in the stock Vista/Dell drivers means Windows Update fails BADly. Only one problem – the latest version of the drivers (10.8) do NOT support the very popular ICH8 chipset. v9.6 DOES, but it’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to find. I finally found a version of it (Google STOR_allOS_9.6.0.1014_PV) and was able to update the drivers. Restart and windows update worked great. Ran Windows Update Readiness Tool just to be safe. If I was doing Windows XP? I’d do an F6 floppy install of v9.6 before the install (Vista method for this is slightly different) I believe this would cause much less trouble. Or at least make sure that was the FIRST update I did after booting the system.

I gave it 5 stars because the drive is great, WD provides the necessary tools and documentation. It was the lack of the driver that killed me.

Pros: Good price, reliable

Cons: none

Overall Review: Replaced a friend’s laptop hdd and it worked great

Pros: Great price for 250 Gb notebook drive. I received 3 and they all work, used them in in Mac computers, and a couple PC notebooks, switching them around, reformatting, copying files just to make sure they all performed OK.

Cons: none.

Overall Review: There is some info label on the drive about using some WD alignment software if the drive will be used with XP. I am only using them with Mac and Win 7, so that does not apply to me.

Pros: Nice NO noise hard drive. Do what it’s suppose to do.

Cons: No Cons.

Overall Review: Will buy again 🙂 Really

Pros: Brand new
Its slightly smaller

Cons: N/A

Overall Review: HD was made Sept 2012, so I still got a good amount of warranty on it 🙂

Pros: Inexpensive.

Cons: Slow.

Overall Review: Works fine as a cheap drive for consumer laptops. I’ve pulled a bunch of these dead drives out of my friends’ laptops, but it’s tough to blame the drive when the laptops are constantly being carried around and dropped.

Pros: It’s Western Digital they’re always fantastic in my opinion. I bought this for a MAC book with Intel. Worked nicely. Price was great too!

Cons: N/A