Western Digital Caviar® Special Edition WD1600JB 160 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive

Pros: Decent speed, large capacuty, 8MB buffer
Cons: Drive died in undera year. Dead drives are pretty slow...

Background information Some time ago I wrote a review on a Western Digital 250GB hard drive that I had to have replaced six times before finally giving up and tossing it in the trash. I only mention this because I have had a blunt reminder of ...

Pros: Western Digital reputation for reliability, extra cache, fast speed and quiet operation.
Cons: Useless tools, picky jumper settings, short warranty.

Introduction The Western Digital 160 gigabyte hard drive represents one of the best values in an IDE interface drive today. It's large size, quiet mechanism, fast data acquisition and solid reputation for reliability make it a first choice for a ...

Pros: Fast, plenty of space, WD has good reputation, acceptable noise level
Cons: Drive gets HOT, Not useable for all mother boards and OS systems

This review covers the Western Digital Caviar WD1600JB Special Edition 160 GB Hard Drive. So you edit video, collect DivX movies or just plain need LOTS of hard disk space. Well this might be the drive for you. Western Digital enjoys good ...

Pros: PRICE, performance, quiet, did I mention PRICE!!!
Cons: Only a 1 year warranty.

There are other reviews of this drive available as well so I'll keep this one fairly short and simple. In short, it's worth the price. Details of the drive - * 160 gig advertised capacity. * 149 gig formatted capacity (on the right computer) ...

Pros: Shiny and black
Cons: Cord is too short, drive life is too short.

Just like the other reviews, it worked great until it died suddenly. None of 15 recovery programs I pirated would recover it. Most would recognize a drive attached, but none would find a partition or boot sector. Just like some one turned off a ...

Pros: Big drive, fast access time. 3 year warranty - you're gonna need it.
Cons: It failed. Bad customer service.

Okay...first off, when I bought this hard drive, no problems. After my 40 gig got a little too small for my extensive collection of music, I drove over to Best Buy and purchased this drive. During the same trip, I purchased a WD 80 gig drive. ...

Pros: Easy installation, smooth, quiet operation
Cons: NOne that I know of

Have been thinking of upgrading my 6 GB hard drive for a while. I have a P3-500 running Win 98. Sometime last year, got an 80GB WD and was hell. The Lifeguard tools and the documentation that came with it was extremely unfriendly. Installed the drive and ran the tools and everything was fine. It even identified the drive and the size correctly. The very next day after a power cycle, the drive was unrecognized. Couldn't get it to work and had to return it.

This time, I couldn't resist the huge rebate on WD1600 at Circuit City. Went ahead and got it. Surprisingly, the tools and documentation and the overall installation experience was extremely smooth. It had clear instructions for Win98 environment, the Lifeguard CD created a floppy for installation of the HD on a win 98 and it was very simple and straightforward. I know that I could see only a max of 137 GB, and am planning to get it fixed. But the fact that the imstallation process was simple is great. WD must have listened to all the gripes about their tools/docs and has finally corrected it. Great job.

Pros: It is a large fast drive that worked very well in an Apple eMac
Cons: It catastrophically failed, with total data loss, after two months of use.

The drive was installed in an Apple eMac. Installation was typical, there were no problems formatting it or using it with Mac OS 10.3.9. It is a nice, big and fast hard drive. I'd say a five star rating until this week.

The drive died with absolutely no warning a mere two months after it was installed. It just plain stopped. All efforts at data recovery, including freezing it, were for naught. We did not spend the small fortune required to attempt a clean room recovery. We do daily backups but we still lost a day's worth of work in addition to the time spent trying to recover the data and replace the drive.

It was well within the warranty period so WD replaced it with no problems. Great. I wonder how long this one will last.

An unreliable hard drive is useless.

Pros: Great price for the size, and good documentation/drivers/software on the WDC web site.
Cons: 1 year warranty.

I have used Western Digital drives for years, specifically, the "Special Edition" drives with the 8MB cache. I just bought a second WD1600JB at Best Buy -- and with $80 in rebates my cost was around $38.

These are solid drives and I would highly recommend them.

Pros: None, my time & money were wasted, now I have to install everything again.
Cons: Worst drive in it's class, pure garbage.

I have bought, installed and used hundreds of WD drives in the past, never had a problem. It seems the WD's quality and quality control have completely broken down, no pun intended.

I am not the only one, it seems many have had this drive fail right around 2 months, like a timebomb.

I will never buy another WD product again, ever.