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

5/23/14 This WD Black 1TB is used as the main storage device. I'm using a Kingston SSD as the OS/application drive. Creating and formatting the Win7 volume went smoothly. Transferring 500GB of data from my WD Red drive to this new WD Black drive went smoothly. This new black drive has much faster read speeds and very decent write speeds compared to other 7200RPM SATA drives I've used. I also noticed that the speed was impressive when I booted to win7 from it (I loaded a backup boot partition in case my SSD fails). No, not as fast as my SSD, but much faster than my WDSE and WDRed NAS backup drives, which also have SATA3 at 7200 rpm. To be true: (My black ultra high speed drive started clicking and cracking after about 2.5 months. Hey. It happens sometimes with hard drives. Okay, no big deal, the drive comes with a 3 year old Wd warranty delivered.-WD website and spent about 1/2 hour on the RMA process.website.WHAT?The model number I sent them doesn't match the model number they sent me I have looked at the model number they sent me and they had a slower/cheaper blue hard drive with only a 1 year warranty I called WD to confirm they took the call after a few minutes through the phone tree had gone.The person I spoke to was very polite and spoke no language.He said they didn't have black drives to ship so they sent the blue ones I tactfully let him know that was not acceptable and asked for a WD Red or SE - Hard drive as a replacement. You would think I would have asked Congress United States to agree on something. I spoke to 3 different representatives on 3 separate phone calls with no resolution. I have had many dealings with WD in the past. I have been working in network IT for over 20 years. I've never had problems like this with WD. I don't like politely suggesting a solution to a problem after a few hours of my time. All this on a $90 hard drive. I'll let you know when the problem is finally fixed. UPDATE 05/28/14. I called WD's corporate account. svk. queue this morning. The operator was very nice and made sure I was connected to a live person and not voicemail. The support agent was very polite and helpful but most importantly he resolved the issue within 30 minutes. The only reason it took so long was that we were looking for a suitable replacement disc which I would be happy with as they couldn't send me any (black) discs. I couldn't believe he actually offered a very generous upgrade for my time and inconvenience, which of course I accepted. I've always loved WD products. My confidence in WD service has been restored. I can't give any "stars" in my rating because I don't get a (black) hard drive. I will rate WD as a company very positively and will not hesitate to purchase from WD in the future. The drive is set as my primary data drive and is spinning up as I write this. The drive does everything that WD promised. I am a happy tourist :) Update from 11/25/14. After my initial review, I added the following Western Digital drives to my systems: (2) 4TB SE NAS Enterprise 7200RPM (1) 4TB Green 5400RPM (2) 1TB Velociraptors 10,000RPM All mine WD drives work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I run a full Lifeguard diagnostic once a week and have had no problems. The fact is that Western Digital hard drives generally work very well in very difficult conditions. I attribute the initial problem with Western Digital's service department to a one-time "accident". They really tried their best to get it right. UPDATE 6/16/16 Since this review has quite a lot of views/comments, I thought I'd do a quick update. All my 2014 WD drives are still working great :) 24x7. UPDATE 4/6/18 Since there are quite a few hits/comments in this test I thought I'd provide a quick update for the failed Green Drive last month. WD sent a replacement with no problems and fast shipping. All other 2014 WD drives still work great :) 24x7. Thank you for your comments. I'm glad I was helpful :)