Review on High-Performance Western Digital 1TB WD Black Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache by Alex Webster

I recently lost my computer due to a technology upgrade cycle and want data redundancy and handy disk clones to test with in different scenarios (different PCs, docking stations, hardware/software cloning, OS cloning, etc.) So I recently bought four of these (one from Revain and three from another PC vendor). All four worked as expected right out of the box, took almost 1TB of Windows 7 OS and user data from other PCs through various disk cloning processes, and then displayed them as expected and allowed me to retrieve and update the data normally. The drives seem to run cool enough and are fairly quiet (considering I'm running them on external open SATA docks) and speeds are ok. Exactly what I would expect from a modern WD drive. Pay a premium for technology and reputation for WD Black instead of, say, WD Blue. Can't comment on reliability/durability yet as I've had these drives for less than a week. + years I have a lot of experience with about 30 WD drives. All consumer drives are 1GB to 4TB in size. I only had two problems. One was entirely my fault. Once, when the drives were sealed with some sort of rubber grommet, the first time I ripped off a small portion of it and removed the drive from the desktop computer case. (Not the HW guy - didn't know what I was doing). This drive failed after a few days - which again was COMPLETELY my fault as air (with hair, dust etc.) got in there for a while. My other drive started making noise and refused to accept a full disk clone by Partition Magic. Version 8.X - probably early 2000s. Again, I didn't want to mess with my data and stopped using this drive. The main reason I chose WD is that the drives seem very reliable and perform well. I use many both bare OEM rims and full WD retail kits depending on price/convenience.