Western Digital Caviar® Special Edition WD2000JB 200 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive (Retail Version)

Pros: Fast performance, included Ultra ATA/100 controller card, lots of storage at a very reasonable price
Cons: Pain to install on older computers, floppy-based drivers, using controller card disable drive activity light

I have a two-year old Dell Dimension computer that was running out of hard disk space (60GB seemed a lot at the time!) so I decided to upgrade to a new Western Digital 200GB Special Edition 7200RPM Hard Drive. The drive comes boxed in plastic ...

Pros: Good fast drive, while it works.
Cons: I've had multiple consecutive failures with these

I've owned several of these hard drives. They've all failed. I've lost many hours of work and hundreds of gigabytes of data. The reliability of these drives has been so extremely poor that I'm afraid to even use some that I have un-opened sitting on my shelf.

After they fail I got replacements, those replacements failed too (mostly). These 200 GB WD drives (and the 160 GB ones too) seem to be so bad that they're even worse than the infamous IBM "Dethstar" (Desktar) drives which were part of a class action lawsuit due to their poor reliability.

I can't recommend buying any product from a company which allows this degree of poor quality product to be sold.

UPDATE: Another 200GB WD drive just died on me. I'm so irritated to have these 200GB WD drives just sitting there in their sealed anti-static bags. It's not even worth using them, because inevitably they all fail. I've emailed WD numerous times, they are not willing to even give me just ONE more reliable HD. I hate Western Digital so much!