Western Digital WD VelociRaptor WD5000BHTZ 500GB 10000 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5″ Enterprise Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Love Velociraptors…nice fast drives and the price has been slowly falling. Good return policies from WD given the price.

WD makes good stuff and they tend to stand behind it in the enterprise space. I’ve been buying their drives for about a decade now, been largely happy with their service.

These 10K drives (along with others like the Seagate Saavio) are built for NAS/SMB file server market. Install a bunch in a decent NAS…format & burn in…then kick back & enjoy the performance. They have an excellent price/performance ratio for the amount of data they can store.

Cons: Not really a con here, but these drives are not nearly as fast as a good SSD. They are also a bit noisy and generate a fair amount of heat. Give them a few minutes to cool off when swapping them out!

Also be sure your enclosure can keep your drives cool. Heat is a drive killer! Check the manufacturer’s compatibility list. Something like a QNAP SS-839 might be a great fit for this product, but the drive isn’t listed as compatible yet.

Overall Review: I’d like to respond to the previous review as well. I had a facepalm moment reading it and that needs to be resolved…
1. Don’t buy a 10K FILE SERVER drive for a laptop. I know that NewEgg puts every 2.5″ drive in the “laptop hard drives” category. I’ll admit that’s misleading, and it’s long overdue for a change. But…dude…what were you thinking? I’m beginning to suspect that they made these drives thicker just to prevent people (like you) from installing them in laptops.
2. Don’t post a negative review based on your lack of diligence. That’s slander. Admit that you made a mistake and point that out to other potential buyers. These drives are a good product, with published specs and many reviews out on the interwebs.
3. Don’t rate yourself a ‘5’ on tech knowledge when you clearly don’t have a clue. You bought a data insurance policy when the drive has a five-year no questions asked return policy directly from WD?
4. Perhaps use your mad tech skillz along with a spell-checking app. “Thinker” is what you should be…”thicker” would be more appropriate to describe a HDD in a review title.

Pros: FAST !!! For a conventional sata 3 HDD Crystal Disk Mark gives it a 202mb read and a 199mb write. When transferring large sequential files like backups of over 20GB, I have seen the burst rate of over 500GB for the first 10-20 seconds. My main drive is a Samsung SSD 840 pro which will read and write at over 500mb’s a second. Not as fast but a lot cheaper and larger, if you can get it on sale.

Cons: It is a little noisier than some other conventional drives but nothing that is offensive.

As mentioned earlier on, it is “thicker” than other 2.5″ drives 15mm height, so don’t go putting it in a laptop, most likely won’t fit. YMMV

Overall Review: As the title says I only use this drive for backups. I purchased a new “Hot Swap Mobile Rack” along with this drive due to the fact my old mobile rack would not accommodate the height / thickness of the drive. Installed the mobile rack in one of the 5.25″ tower bays will support two 2.5″ drives at once. Hope this helps anyone looking for a backup drive.

Pros: This little thing kicks bu!t (seriously guys? that was a 4 letter word?). I use it primarily for my OS in a 4 HD tower. By combining this with a memory upgrade I basically got a new computer for 1/3 the cost. I see the 500 is out and the 600 is in, so this review probably wont reach many. I plan on switching out all my drives one at a time when on sale.

Cons: Some here mention the noise. You can hear it doing its job but that’s not a con to me, I love that grinding sound its old school.

Overall Review: expensive, but what isn’t? This is where Newegg comes in with the clutch move on free (aka included in the price) to low cost shipping. I check a lot of places before every purchase and rarely can another store beat Newegg.

Pros: LIKEZ I GOTZ THIS DRIVE TO LIKES FIT IN MY SAS MEDIA SERVER, AND IT LIKE, DOESNT FITS IN ZE SLOT THINGS…. DAR…..

Cons: And I count gat it to fit the prot, Im out sharring costs and my bacup costs, I donts tinks I can gits it back two!
Is beans riped off.
BOOO HOOO!

Overall Review: Too funny, thanks for the laugh (first reviewer)

Actually, Seriously, I have two of these running just fine in my Serviio Linux media server, RAID0 and it is now streaming full HD 1080p uncompressed video that I rip from my bluray beautifully.

As posted by the second poster, they are fast and well worth the money when you know what you are working with and do your homework. Not for the laptop market.

Pros: Super fast, without vibration, and did I say Quick! All the Raptors I’d had have been without issue, super reliable.

Cons: None, except the height, not 9.5mm. Not for modern laptops but I knew this before buying.

Overall Review: I’m getting reads over 180MB/sec. For a HDD this is good.

Pros: unknown

Cons: This IS NOT a laptop drive.
I ordered this drive thinking it would be a perfect upgrade for an engineer computer, NO NO NO.
This drive is twich as thick as a standard 2.5″ form factor drive and WILL NOT fit inside any laptop that I am aware of.

Pros: I don’t know, I wasn’t even able to use it!

Cons: It is too think to fit into my laptop, it is about 1.5 to 2 time thicker then a normal laptop drive. Make sure you check your laptop to ensure it has the proper clearance for a thicker drive.

Overall Review: I am going to have to return this and eat the shipping and restocking fees. I also had purchased the data recovery for this drive … I don’t think I can get a refund on that. I wish it would have been clearer from the beginning that this drive is so much thicker and is not a standard laptop hard drive size!