Western Digital WD1600JSRTL Caviar 160GB SATA Hard Drive

As the review title says, this is a pretty good buy insofar as quality. It was somewhat of a necessity for me because I wanted to dual boot Windows XP and Vista--the free Ubuntu Linux partitioning tool would not work on one of my computers, so I had to consider other options. Rather than purchase a third-party partitioning tool to be used once and never again, I decided to buy a second hard drive, which in the case of the WD1600JSRTL ended up costing only a little more than the partitioning software.

So far, I have had no problems. Installation was about as easy as my HP m7640n Media Center PC allows--it's a tight fit, but that's not Western Digital's fault. Your individual results will vary in this capacity, though the actual act of fitting the SATA and power connectors is not terribly difficult. That having been said, the end of the connector that connects to the drive fits somewhat tightly and requires a little force to be properly inserted. After physical installation, it's simply a matter of powering up the computer, installing the included software, and then configuring the drive in the manner of your choosing.

Configuring the drive as a boot device is a little less than intuitive, though; somehow I ended up screwing up my boot order and making my copy of Windows XP MCE unbootable. But such is life; I guess I'm stuck with Vista now, good or bad. I strongly encourage those reading this review to research the topic of installing an OS on a second hard drive very thoroughly before performing this action. It's probably a simple thing I did to end up in the situation that came about, but I don't want it to happen to anybody else.

It is in fact much easier to configure the drive to serve as information storage. Simply select that option using the included software, and the drive will quickly be recognized and formatted however you wish.

As far as price/performance, though the drive itself offers pretty good performance, it's a little pricey when one considers the cost-per-gigabyte. This comes out to about fifty-six cents per gigabyte, which is not particularly cost effective. However, higher capacity hard drives cost somewhat-to-considerably more than the WD1600JSRTL, even if their cost-per-gigabyte is lower. So if you're in the market for an inexpensive hard drive for light to medium storage and/or need a second drive to dual boot two operating systems, then the WD1600JSRTL is worth a look.

These hard drives are very good. They installed very easily and quickly. The data transfers fast and there in not much noise. Overall, it is an excellent product.

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Hard drives are hard drives. Most users won't notice any difference in them except for two factors:

1. If they run out of space, they'll wish they'd bought a larger one.

2. If it fails.

I had no complaints about the size of this drive. While 160G is considered to be more modest these days, I was fine with the capacity. I have some photos, some music, and a large number of text files. I bought this drive to replace the drive of an older desktop that we occasionally use for web-browsing, storing photos and email.

What bothers me is that the drive, used very lightly, crashed in less than one year of installation. I would expect better from a brand name drive like Western Digital. I'll try to post later when I check the warranty of the drive and how Western Digital handles it.

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This hard drive was put on a computer with Windows XP. It worked axactly as described. I have had it for 3 years now wish no problems.

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I wanted a internal drive to enclose in a external case in this case an Antec, to store pictures and video's from my Sanyo HD camera. I found both the drive and the case to be just what I wanted. I would give it 5 stars except for the fact that the software would not let me format in Fat 32. It plugs into my Hd TV with the Sanyo software and works perfect.