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Review on ๐Ÿ’พ WD 2TB Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD2003FZEX by Jeff Jordan

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Great all round high performance hard drive - with three caveats

These are AWESOME high performance hard drives that will last a lifetime and are backed by a warranty unmatched by anyone in the industry as of June. October 28, 2021 Over the years I have ordered about 12 of these drives of various capacities and form factors and only 1 of them has failed due to physical abuse. I have a couple of these drives (2TB/2003FZEX) on my main computer that were installed in April 2016. More than 5 years have passed and these drives have accumulated over 50,000 hours of operation without any problems. They have seen all this in these more than 5 years. High temps, low temps, dozens of power outages, even crashing I-20 at 75-80 mph for 6 hours. You've seen 5 major operating systems (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Xubuntu 16.04 LTS, Xubuntu 18.04 LTS and now Debian 10 and 11) and just move on. They have since survived their 5 year warranty and have continued to take a beating. They're also INCREDIBLY fast, with an average sequential read and write speed of around 125MB/s, which is one of the reasons I DO NOT use SMR drives - SMR drives have incredibly slow performance compared to their CMR counterparts , and CMR drives will wipe the floor with even the fastest SMR drives. Now for the caveats. 1) These discs are HOT. Like "burn your hand" hot. Make sure they are well ventilated, or plan to wait a bit after a power outage for the drive to cool before handling the drive. 2) Be careful who you buy from. If the seller on Revain is NOT Western Digital, DO NOT BUY FROM AMAZON. Buy direct from Western Digital's website. Third party resellers tend to open the packaging and tamper with the disc, which can cause problems in the future if you need to return the disc. 3) This is not a problem that many people face, but it is something to consider. If you connect a WD SATA 2 or better drive to a SATA 1 controller, you will get pretty poor performance (PATA/133) since SATA 1 does not support NCQ or native command queuing. NCQ allows the hard drive to execute commands in the most efficient order, resulting in a significant increase in data transfer rate. Overall, these are solid drives and are my top pick for quality, high performance, general purpose general purpose drives and would have no hesitation in recommending them again.

Pros
  • great product
Cons
  • something different