Review on 💯 Reliable and High-Performance Western Digital WD2001FASS 2 TB Caviar Black Desktop Hard Drive with 3GB/s SATA Interface and 7200 RPM by Gordon Turman

2TB capacity, large cache, high performance for less than $200. Really close to $150 these days? Hard to believe. I tried and bought 2 of them. They seemed good for 2-3 months then I started getting SMART monitoring errors. Disks operate as separate entities and follow best practices etc. Disk 1 dies after a few weeks. WD will easily replace it with a newer version with a much higher serial number (the original was very low so I was able to get some of the early production batches). Now this disk works with no real problems, although SMART load_cycle_count is increasing faster than it should, which can be fixed for most controllers, but not with the 3ware JBOD controller I'm using. Hm. Well, it might fail in a few years, and then I'll take care of it. WD has a 5 year warranty. Drive 2 fails about 6 months after purchase. Monitoring uncovers a large number of unrecoverable errors offline. This drive also had a very low serial number, so there may have been initial manufacturing issues. RMA is easy. However, WDC shipped a "recertified" drive with a fairly low serial number, and this drive reports errors within days of installation. I've installed 5 Enterprise WDC RE4 drives in 6 months with no issues (smart reports show excellent health) and the only drives I've had issues with are Black Caviar which has a 150% failure rate. I will try to update the SATA cable of the current problem drive. In the future I will only buy RE4 for WDC SATA. No more black caviar.