Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM 2.5IN 8MB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD3200BEVT

PLUSES: It's large, quiet, fast. It easily and perfectly fits where a 20-40-60-80 GB, 2.5" SATA drive would, including in a PS3. MINUSES: You may be able to find larger drives but not everyone may need more. Of course, it's no longer 'the biggest' but I knew that a couple of months ago, when I upgraded my PS3. I also figured that, since I have no plans of storing a movie library, 320 GB would carry me for the next couple of years. After that, it's likely that I'd be buying the next generation game/multimedia machine. Advice to the PS3 upgraders from someone who, after some hesitation, actually did it: - Go for the highest capacity. If it's a 2.5" SATA and you can afford it you should probably go with it. I already replaced my original PS3 drive with a 320GB but my formerly 60GB laptop has a 500GB 2.5" WD SATA now. - If you need to format this drive or any drive to Fat32, the best utility I found was FAT32FORMAT.EXE - Google and you shall find it out there. I'm not reviewing the formatter utility but I can tell you that it does a drive in less than 10 seconds AND it works on Vista. - It helps to have a 60-80 USB-connected drive handy to backup your PS3 content before upgrading. With one of these as the backup device, the PS3 fully restore EVERYTHING, including whatever copywrited or protected objects, such as, in my case the PS2 memory cards emulations. _______________________________________ Note (March 12, 2009) The Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT seems to be the way to go these days. I like WD and the 500GB is selling now for less than I paid for the 320GB. I actually helped a couple of friends upgrade with this drive and it was quick and easy. Note 2: (April 8, 2009) The review above was for the 320GB, which I used to upgrade my PS3. I just ordered the 500GB because life became almost unbearable with a 60GB on my laptop. I am planning to swap the drives without actually reinstalling the OS and the apps with help from Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery . Note 3: (April 12, 2009) - Laptop Upgrade My 2 year old Thinkpad T60 came with a wimpy 60GB SATA drive. I needed the ability to upgrade to the much larger 500GB and do it without having to reinstall the OS, apply the service packs and then reinstall and configure 100 different little apps. Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery allowed me to do all of the above in about one hour. Its Utilities section has a 'clone' option that would copy EVERYTHING, including the Master Boot Record/Sector (MBR) from the puny 60GB drive unto the 500GB while allowing me to control the size of the active partition - this while the 500GB was connected through a USB wire and the laptop booted off the program's CD. Once the operation completed (50 minutes) I simply removed the old 60GB drive off my laptop and replaced it with the 500GB drive. Once the laptop was turned back on it booted up happily, with a 200GB master partition and a 300GB second partition. There are 3 words that I have to use to describe the process: PERFECTION and COMPLETE SATISFACTION. This capability alone is worth the price of this product. To my surprise, with the new drive, the Primary Hard Disk score as computed by Microsoft (right click on 'My computer' then select 'Properties') jumped from a decent 4.8 to an unexpected 5.7.

First of all, there used to be two product listings for this hard drive, both identical except for the ASIN numbers. One was listed as the stand alone, the other was listed in the Western Digital Scorpio Blue page with the pull-down menu that has all the different sized drives in the series. I have no idea what the difference is. Amazon, for some reason, took down the 500 GB listing from the pull-down menu and it now has it's own page. Odd they chose that direction. It would have made more sense to remove the individual listing. Ok, this is for PS3 owners/upgraders. This drive fits the PS3 wonderfully and runs nice and cool with no issues. For the price you can't go wrong. I have the 40 GB PS3 (Spider Man 3 bundle) and have the data (saves + install) of about 10 games and I was running out of space. I did a lot of research of the various SATA 2.5" laptop hard drives available. I researched all the various brands and compared reviews and prices vs size. I came to the conclusion that a 500 GB drive for $100 is a steal given the extra space gained, so that's the direction I went. Of all the brands, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue series seemed to have the most positive reviews all over with the least amount of reviews stating drive failure, so that's the one I chose. Installing was extremely easy after backing up my data. The longest part of the whole procedure was backing up and restoring the data. I won't go into details, but I do recommend the app another reviewer used to format an external drive larger than 32GB in the FAT32 file system. It's called "fat32format". It works extremely well and extremely fast (less than 4 seconds for a 120GB external drive). Just follow the directions and you're good. I did this because in order for the PS3 to recognize the external drive it has to be formatted in the FAT32 file system. As for the procedure of upgrading the PS3, just google "upgrade PS3 hard drive" and you'll get tons of tutorials and videos. Now here's something important: A lot of people who upgraded their PS3's and saw xxx/465 GB free after upgrading are not realizing that this is not the fault of the PS3. You could put the same drive in a laptop and it will have the same 465GB. This is because manufacturers advertise a gigabyte as something different than what windows or the PS3 recognize. Manufacturers see a gigabyte (GB) as 1000 megabytes, and 1 megabyte (MB) as 1000 kilobytes (KB), when in actuality windows sees 1 MB as 1024 KB. So that's where the unaccounted lost space goes. So as of now, my opinion is that this hard drive is a great choice for PS3 upgrades. If you don't want to drop a bill on the 500GB version they also have the Scorpio Blues in smaller sizes for reduced prices. I like this hard drive so much I may replace my laptop hard drive with one.

I bought this purely to upgrade my PS3 from a 40GB drive to a 320GB drive. It installed fine, formatted fine, and appears to be working fine. The only issues I had was using the backup and restore functions on the PS3 itself, but that isn't the fault of the drive. For the record, don't really trust the backup part to do a good job. Mine would back up to my external 250GB drive that I was using just fine, but when I went to restore it, it would fail at about 17% in. It was like it was corrupt or something. So, I put back in my old drive and it too acted like the main boot part that held all the PS3 system info was corrupted, so I had to reinstall the firmware again, luckily it didn't mess up any of my saved data. Anyway, I called Sony to figure out what was going on with the backup. The guy didn't really know what the problem was (shocker) and told me that if it didn't work, to just put the old drive back in and copy things one by one with a thumb drive or something. Well, after about the 5th try it finally somewhat worked enough that I got most of the things I wanted off of it and I just re-downloaded the things it didn't copy. Moral to the story, don't expect something that is easy to be easy. Expect to have troubles. All in all, the drive itself is great. I don't hear it (didn't expect to be able to), it doesn't appear to get hot (but then again I never put my hands on the unit when it is running or the system itself. never did with the old drive either), and I don't get any lag or pauses or anything that I remember seeing people talk about on here before. So, if you want a bigger drive, go ahead and get this one. It will work fine. Just, like I said, don't expect the backup and restore function to work as easy as it appears it should. LOL

I just upgraded to this Scorpio Blue WD 320GB after my Scorpio Blue 160GB burned out after about a year, maybe a year and a half - that said I pushed that small 5400RPM 160GB drive to the limits of its probably intended paramaters or whatever - I dont measure the diagnostic statistics of drives and how much one heats up my CPU vs other drives and all that, but that SBWD160GB drive I burned out probably went past what it should have been able to take - I pretty much 'round the clock had uTorrent going with 10 to 20 downloads at a time with HandBrake or RipBot going backing up DVDs/BluRays while surfing the net and doing a virus scan or some other damn thing and that drive stood up to that almost 24hr 7 days a week pumishment for like I said a year to a year and a half - I dont think it was made for that kind of abuse - knowing this I tried to ALWAYS back up anythig completed or saved new or downloaded at the end of each day or as I went - I only lost a little personal word pad stuff I was stupid enough to not back-up months ago and a few downloads/back-ups that were recent and yet to be copied to my many back-up drives [I keep back-ups in triplicate, all that work and effort I will not accept loosing to wishful thinking] so all in all I would highly reccommend this drive to any laptop person that just does the ''normal'' amount of surfing and downloading and even to someone like me that just cant afford a desktop monster machine etc. Its a good drive - Tip: when you have to start using an external regular desk fan to keep the drive from catching fire definatly start backing-up your stuff and get ready for it to literally crash and BURN! PS - this new one runs VERY cool to the touch of the laptop unlike the one the 160GB I burned out you could feel the heat baking off that one the last 4-5 months of its life - and this new 320GB 5400RPM is VERY quiet - my internal fan is the only thing I can hear coming from my laptop - if you are poor like me and want space - get this drive!

Hello, I just wanted to say that; If you are considering a new hard drive, I don't see how you could ever do better than this one. I used Apricorn to clone my old drive (OEM 'seagate 120gb') and it did exactly what it was supposed to. This 320gb drive is faster than the old one and does seem to be running cooler. Great price, Great product. I am unable to write one of the 'tech' reviews as I am just an old guy with a laptop. This drive arrived wrapped in 4 full inches (deep) of the good bubble wrap. I opened it up, plugged it into the Apricorn box thing, and cominced to clone my drive. That took something like 50 minutes. Now came the hard part, remove and replace, so I took a deep breath and opened my computer up. The drive replacement was very easy as it was quite obvious what I needed to change over (i.e. the caddy, and the pin adapter). Put the new drive in, cover on and snugged down. I turned the computer on and waa-laa, Windows XP starting up according to instructions by Apricorn. If you are not one of the folks who do this sort of thing all the time and just want to upgrade your laptop, then this is for you. Simple and straight forward. Pay attention to your cloning software, do what it tells you, make sure you don't get carried away with tightening the tiny screws, USE THE CORRECT SIZE PHILLPS HEAD SCREWDRIVER. Good luck and I honestly hope your experience is a good as mine has been so far. Take care folks. Thanks Western Digital.

My Macbook Pro recently gained a little pooch, those jeans we bought just a few months ago started getting tight, and I had to let out the belt a few notches. So I started hunting for a new drive. Being a faithful WD Customer, I decided I would give their internal laptop drive a try. I've had several other products of theirs that haven't screwed me over yet. I've had this drive a good month and a half, and I haven't had any troubles in terms of crashing or weird behavior. although, it's always a good idea to backup, no matter how great a drive is. I'll be sure to update this review in the coming months with any changes. Here's some of the reasons I bought this drive: #1. My Current HD was full, or very near, and once this drive was up I had a good 200 GB of space. That's a Smickle-pickle load of space for a laptop. #2. WD is generally a reliable brand, I haven't had any problems with them, and their internal and external hard-drives get very good reviews, especially compared to competitors products. Some might be concerned whether this is for laptops or not: I was new to HD's and had to do quite a bit of research. To clarify, Yes, this is compatible with laptops. All 2.5 IN" Drives are. I Haven't had any problems with heating up, either. Macbooks tend to run hot, so I was concerned about this issue. I have maintained about the same temperatures, give or take. It almost feels quieter, but that might just be my imagination, I don't have anything to prove it. The point it, I didn't notice it was hotter or louder than my original drive. All in All, I'm very pleased with this drive and will keep all of you updated. Peace Out, and keep this in mind if your computer needs to undergo a gastric.

I bought this to replace the miniscule 40 GB drive in my PS3, which I filled to capacity by merely playing PS3 games that required up to 6 GB of space to install. Why PS3 games require such a ridiculous amount of space is certainly a topic worthy of discussion, however, this is not the forum. Installing this hard drive was a breeze. For those who need help, a little instruction: 1. Use the PS3's backup feature to backup all your existing hard drive's information. Use a USB flash drive, external hard drive, or iPod (I used my 120 GB classic). 2. Unplug your PS3, then pop the hard drive cover off the PS3 using a small flat head screwdriver. 3. Unscrew the screws keeping your hard drive in place. This will take a small Philips screwdriver, the kind used for computers and the like. Don't use a big one unless you enjoy stripping screws and cursing a lot. 4. Pull the old hard drive out. Unscrew the other screws keeping it in place in its hard drive cage. 5. Pop the hard drive out of its cage. Put the new hard drive in the cage. Screw it in. 6. Put the cage back in place and screw it in. 7. Put the cover back on. 8. Plug your PS3 back in and turn it on. It will ask you to format. Go ahead, can't do any harm. 9. Use the PS3's internal restore feature to restore all the information you previously backed up. 10. SYNC YOUR TROPHY INFORMATION if you're interested in such things. I almost had a heart attack when I thought I'd lost all my trophies. Syncing with the server will put them all back in place. 11. Enjoy your massive new hard drive. 12. Think about how you might have compressed this list to maybe 4 or 5 steps instead of 12. 13. Or 13 for that matter. This hard drive is currently serving its purpose quite well. It's also noticeably quieter than the factory 40 GB, a big plus.

I picked up a Toshiba laptop second hand, and it needed a new hard disk. After reading some other reviews, I settled on this model. It proved to be a solid little drive, and a good value. CONNECTIONS ----------- Make sure you know what kind of connection your laptop uses. This is a SATA drive. Look at the drive you are wanting to replace, and compare its connector(s) to the ones you see in this product's picture. They should match. SPEED: 5400 vs 7200 RPM ----------------------- Each drive has a spindle speed, representing the maximum number of revolutions per minute. On first impression, you might think that faster speeds are better. The reality is that it depends on what you're doing with your laptop. If you are running a database or application that will make many read/write operations, on an ongoing basis, then consider getting a 7200 RPM (or faster) drive. High-end game players might prefer the faster speed disks, too. If you just want to use your PC for typical everyday uses--a little web surfing, email, some games, and document creation--or plan to use the machine to store media files (e.g., photos, songs, movies), then 5400 can serve you better. A 5400 RPM drive provides some benefit when reading sequential data (e.g., media files). Since the machine I was repairing was going to be used for school work and as a media storage device, I decided the 5400 suited me best. A NOTE ON DRIVE HEIGHT ---------------------- While researching this one, I found numerous notes suggesting that this series of drives can be larger (thicker) than some other laptop drives, meaning they won't fit in some machines. That's only true of the drives in the Scorpio Blue series that are LARGER THAN 500 Gb (i.e., the 750 Gb and 1 Tb models). This 500 Gb drive is no thicker than any other standard laptop disk I've had.

nice product, value for money

I bought this 320GB HD to replace the very full 80GB HD on one of my laptops. It arrived promptly, even though there was a postal strike, and was packaged very securely, in fact it was a little like pass the parcel as i unwrapped it from several boxes. It took no time at all to clone my 80GB HD onto this HD using an exteranl caddy, which i also purchased at the same time, and once this was done it was a simple matter of swapping drives and re-booting system, Job done, (although to make sure everything was good i did use the vista OS disc to repair any possible errors). In no time at all i had cloned my old HD, which was now full, to this cheap and cheerful HD, saving all my personal data in no time at all. It is the first time i have used Western Digital but i do know it won't be the last. UPDATE... A year on and this HD is still running as well as it did on day one... (i hope i haven't jinxed it here then). It is still quiet and quick to use so i am still a happy chappie with this year old purchase... one thing though, all though this is normal behaviour for a WD, so WD tell me, it does make the odd loud click when shutting down, but after contacting WD they tell me that this is the heads settling in to protect the Drive in case of sudden falls.

Non ho riscontrato problemi di sorta. Il disco è arrivato ben protetto nella sua confezione antistatica. Montato ed installato il sistema operativo si è rivelato molto veloce e non ha presentato alcun problema meccanico o elettronico e... di questi tempi... è un miracolo.

algo normal

Wie bereits von der Mehrheit anderer Käufer erwähnt:diese 250 GB interne FP ist schnell im Zugriff,flüsterleise und verursacht auch bei erhöhter Arbeitslast so gut wie keine Geräusche.Leider ist das wohl nicht bei allen Kunden der Fall gewesen!Der Einbau,die Formatierung und das Aufspielen eines Betriebssystems inkl. aller nötigen Software ging kurz und schmerzlos über die Bühne-gefühlt wesentlich schneller als bei der ursprünglichen 120GB FP von Fujitsu-Siemens.Mit einem geeigneten Benchmark-Tool lassen sich auch wesentlich mehr Parameter als beim Vorgängermodell auslesen(z.B. Temeratur,was bei Notebooks nicht gerade unwichtig ist.). Mein Fazit:ich bin mit dieser Festplatte sehr zufrieden und würde sie auch wieder kaufen! Der Versand durch Amazon war wie immer sehr schnell und die FP war sicher verpackt.