Western Digital 2TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EZAZ

I bought this DISK 2 years ago and so far I've had no issues with it, is not my main hard drive since I'm using a NVME as main, but this disk runs things smooth, not the fastest compared to the NVME but gets the job done, very happy with the purchase.

Got this to replace my WD Caviar Green 1.5TB drive, which is 6 years old, mostly in continuous (24 hr/d) use in that time and starting to show some early wear indications on disk health programs (no failures indicated though). I've tried several brands of hard drives over the last 30 years, and have found Western Digital drives to be the most reliable for me. I chose the WD Blue 3 TB 5400 rpm drive because it was WD (i.e., reliability, ease of use, support, etc., all the things WD is known for), provides excellent capacity and performance for the price, and would be quiet and low power. My current desktop build is nearly absolutely silent (which is what I was shooting for when I spec'd out the components) and I wanted to keep it that way. The power and noise levels for the 5400 rpm Blue were much better than alternative 7200 rpm drives. The file operations were already about 50% faster than my existing Caviar Green unit (6GB/s vs. 3). Since I use the drive in a Maxell "hyper-duo" hybrid configuration paired with an Adata 60GB SSD (my Asus mother board has that feature built in) I was not too concerned about speed of file operations. I have all of my programs and the most frequently accessed data files on a 250 GB SSD, I just want the hard drive for media files (pictures, videos, music) and less accessed other data. This drive is very quiet and so far is performing well.

I broke the SATA connector on the 2TB boot drive in a work computer I use at home. Rather than tape the cable in place I spent about $50 on a replacement drive that has no problems performing the same task with equivalent capacity to the one I broke. I had no problem restoring the linux boot by recovering from the drive I broke the connector on. This drive is 4 inches wide and the doesn't need a mounting tray to fit my workstation. I replaced, the drive I broke the connector on, so all is well. I don't use it for gaming so that vote is an assumption that top performance games would benefit from something at least faster and probably higher capacity. Not concerns for this linux boot disk. As usual for disks it's capacity is about 2 decimal power TB rather than 2 binary power TiB, so the binary power capacity is about 1.82 TiB. Same as the drive it replaced but kind of annoying in the present day, though that's not really much of a case. The drive is fine, cheap, decent capacity and a trusted brand for my use.

Well, so far, it has been a good hard drive. I arrived as promised, brand new in a sealed box with no damage. Unboxing and removing it from the ESD bag was easy. Saved the box and bag just in case. Visual inspection showed no defects.Installing and formatting into my tower was simple. I did a disk check just to make sure the drive hadn't been damaged during shipment and that came back as expected, no errors. The speed and noise are acceptable since I am using it strictly as a data drive. I have been slowly moving data to it from my externals so I don't have to keep track of what trip is where. Haven't experienced any hiccups with moving the data, but there has been a slow down at times when moving large vid files or large batches of jpg or audio files at the same time. Most of that though is most likely going from a usb external device crossing the bus and then into the drive itself.No complaints so far. It is working as advertised, but I would have liked it to have been 7200 rpm though

First had issues getting BIOS to recognize the drive. Then the disk manager wouldn't recognize it. Then it wouldn't format it. After all that, plugged it into another computer to see if it was just my computer, blue screen and still no drive. Returning and waiting on my replacement, I'll give it one more shot. I'm a huge fan of WD, this one will make or break my next purchases with them.Updated 06 Jan 16:I received a new drive, hooked it up and the computer instantly recognized it and prompted me to format. Drive is working great, about 2.7TB total. It's used pretty heavily, but so far so good. I do recommend this drive to anyone who's looking for more storage space, but not wanting to break the bank!Update: 20 January 2021Drive is still holding up well. Used it as a main drive for a while and then as a backup, no issues with moving data across and no hiccups whatsoever. Great quality!