Right back to the Store for a Refund!
Written: Oct 27 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: SATA, large capacity, Cheap
Cons: Didn't work,terrible directions, difficult installation. Never recognized by xp, not native sata
The Bottom Line: Don't get suckered on the cheap price. Remember, adding a HDD should be a snap and it should actually work!
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| eyeshot's Full Review: Western Digital WD 250GB 2500JD SATA 150 7200RPM 8... |
I feel for the low price and got burned. I've Maxtor, Samsung, and about 20 other hard drives over the years. This one, supposedly the most advanced of the lot, was the one that didn't fly.
I had read reviews on SATA hard drives and I was keeping my eye out for the Seagate 200gb Barracuda and it was never stocked anywhere I generally shop (Best Buy, Circuit City, Comp USA). So when I saw the WD 200GB SATA for $109 at Circuit City, I went for it. I needed another drive and well, it was cheap.
On a quirky side note, I checked the website before I left for Circuit City and it was $109 ($169-$30 price break-$30 mail in rebate). By the time I got to the store, the drive was $169 w/ a $30 mail in rebate. I even checked the website and it was updated to the higher price. Strange. But I digress...
So $139 it was, which is still a decent bargain price. So I bought it. Now I've added/removed/swapped hundreds of Hard Drives over the years so I'm not a complete newbie to the process. Changing a HDD is pretty easy these days. Shut down, connect, fire up the machine. Well, not with this HDD. For the life of me, I couldn't get the darn thing to mount in Windows XP. Check, re-check, re-connect all the connections. At one point, it did pop up as being found under new hardware but it never went beyond that and I could never get it to show up again or get the drive to even power up. Bad sata cable? Maybe. Bad drive? Maybe. After about an hour of pouring through the terrible directions and not getting the drive to power up much less be recognized I packed her back up.
The nice thing about Circuit City is returns aren't too much of a problem so it was all in all about a total of a 3 hour loss of time. Had I ordered it via the net and had to pay shipping and shipping back I would have been bummed.
IMHO, in todays day and age, dropping a 200GB HDD into a computer should be a snap and take less than 5 minutes. I just don't think there's an excuse for a painful HDD addition these days. Also, kind of buried in the literature, it says that the drive shouldn't be placed on it's edge and can only be used flat. Well, again, in this day and age, that's just silly. Many smaller towers have gone to a verticle HDD configuration rather than flat. Another thing, on further examination and research, the WD SataHDD isn't "native" sata but a converted PATA/IDE.
Bottom line, I ordered what I originally wanted, the Seagate SATA 200gb from newegg.com and it was actually $117.00. By the time I factored shipping, a SATA cable, and tax it came in under $130 dollars. I'll post my opinion on that when I get it.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
eyeshot
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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