WD Blue 160 GB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, PATA, 8 MB Cache - WD1600AAJB

I purchased this hard drive to replace the 60GB hard drive in my HP Pavilion 742n purchased back in 2002. There was nothing wrong with the old hard drive and it had alot of free space left. The HP system recovery is on the D partition of the hard drive, and not on seperate CDs. If the hard drive did go South, I would have to purchase another operating system. I intended to install the WD hard drive and keep the old one as a back up in the event I needed to re-install the operating system.As stated, this is a bulk OEM package. All you get is the hard drive, no cables or attaching screws.I've been in the computer case before to clean out the dust bunnies from the cooling fans, upgrade the memory, and replace the CD writer with a DVD burner. This seemed to be a little more involved and made me a little anxious. In the end, it turned out to be very easy.The ribbon cable connected to the hard drive had provisions to connect two devices. The connectors were clearly marked with "primary" and "slave." I left the jumper settings on both hard drives to "cable select" and connected the WD hard drive to the "slave" connector. There is a diagram printed on the hard drive showing the jumper settings for the different configurations. I did alot of research beforehand on cloning software and decided to just use the Acronis cloning software available from the WD website. The cloning software will only work if it detects a WD component. It was easy to use and pretty much self explanatory. Once the cloning was done, I removed the old hard drive and attached the WD hard drive to the primary connector.The computer booted right up without any problems. I decided to test out the HP system recovery (pressing F10 when you see the blue HP logo) and it didn't boot into the HP system recovery. It just rebooted back to Windows.From what I could determine, it has to do with the partition configuration, which I haven't quite figured out yet, and frankly don't have any plans to at this point.When you do a system recovery, the computer reverts to as it was out of the box, with all the annoying programs that it came with and none of the programs you installed. I have everything set up just like I want it on the old hard drive. If anything should happen, I can just use it to re-install everything.The hard drive is very quiet, in fact, I can't even hear it!All in all, I think this a great product at a very reasonable price and a great way to update an older computer.

I bought this drive to replace another that failed. I back up my wife's system using xxclone, a free application that clones an entire disk, warts and all. You can either clone disk A to disk B then run off B while keeping A as a backup, or run off A and keep B as a backup until you clone again. The clone disk is a complete, bootable replacement for the original disk (except that Windows could possibly and unhelpfully complain. In my experience, changing only the disk but not the disk ID, a feature of xxclone, is tolerated by Windows XP Pro.) I would think that Microsoft could now send out an update to XP systems that would allow easy clone backup of XP systems, seeing as how they have since gone through Vista (with great pain) and 7, but they seem to want to perpetuate the pain of backing up an entire hard drive in case it fails totally -- which seems to be the common mode. They want you to re-install every app and every update -- not customer friendly at all.Sure, the disk is old school, and so is my wife's computer, but it functions well enough for email and occasional word processing. Still, there are things on her computer that would be a pain to lose. Solution: clone the disk to another IDE disk using xxclone every few months.Having used Linux/Ubuntu on other systems, I'll never buy another Microsoft or Apple system again; most people would never notice the difference except for the lack of headaches and cost. But for now, it's great to have available a quality hard drive to back up a legacy computer -- at least until the motherboard fails.

This New Western Digital 320GB Caviar Blue drive is an excellent OEM replacement drive. It comes basic, as expected, without any additional hardware, software or documentation. Usage (jumper assignment) configuration is shown on the drive label. Determine your configuration, set jumper and install drive. After computer start-up, go to drive management software (either OS based or third-party), format and/or partition drive to your specifications and you're up and running. Since I am using this drive simply as additional storage, no BIOS changes were necessary...you may need to make some Hardware BIOS configuration changes depending on your desired system configuration.A few years ago, I had actually purchased a WD 120GB Black Caviar drive as an identical replacement for a dead drive in an older XP system. I have been so happy using the computer since then, I decided to buy this hard drive for more use and storage available. I am very happy with the speed of these drives and their virtually silent operation.Overall, I highly recommend Western Digital drives for quality, performance and ease of operation.

Bought this HD a few days ago and it arrived in the mail today. It was advertized as being "New," but it came in a cardboard box inside another cardboard box, no packaging that you would expect from a "New" product. Took it out of the static bag, and saw some definite wear and tear on the case, nothing major, but definitely noticeable. Not looking too good so far.I plugged it in and pulled up some of the SMART data, only to find that it had been powered up 200+ times with 4 years and 11 months of total powered on time! Holy Cow! 5 years is a pretty long life for a hard drive. Everything else is fine with it, no problems and it runs well, but it's certainly not a new hard drive.Overall, it's decent for the price, but don't get your hopes up.