Review on High-performance Western Digital 160 GB Scorpio PATA Mobile Internal Hard Drive for Superior Data Storage: WD1600VERTL (Blue) by Matt Mosley

This WD 160GB drive was an upgrade from my 4 year old Fujitsu 80GB drive which still worked fine but was too small. The upgrade was painful — not because of the WD drive, but because of Dell's crappy MediaDirect software, which inexplicably reduced the larger 160GB drive to 80GB. Can you believe it? I'll spare you the details, but I had to dig deeper to find a workaround on the TechHandbook website that allowed me to reinstall the new drive at its full 160GB capacity and MediaDirect (which I never used) permanently disable it so it stopped bothering. (Dell website didn't help.) Used Acronis software to clone old drive to new one. That adventure aside, the WD drive still works great - it's pretty whisper-quiet, but not noticeably faster than my 4-year-old Fujitsu. It's nice to have some breathing room on my hard drive and I hope it holds up as well as the trouble free old Fujitsu.