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

I bought a western digital hard drive for my laptop and it was a waste of money. Although the price was ok, the hard drive was a different brand than advertised. The specs matched, so I hooked it up to my computer and it ran for about six months before it died. I assume this is the risk you are taking when buying a used/refurbished computer part.

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…

Excellent replacement or upgrade for PATA/IDE/EIDE drives in older laptops. Quiet and fast. I've used them to upgrade drives and replace failed drives. TIP: Buy/borrow an external drive enclosure, insert the new drive into the enclosure, use Clonezilla ([.]) to copy all the data from the old drive (including multiple operating systems, diagnostic partitions, etc.) to the new drive Replace the old hard drive with a new one and just boot.

I did not purchase this drive to replace the drive installed in my computer. I bought it to replace my backup drive. Since the laptop can't hold two drives, I can't use RAID for redundancy. However, Apricorn has a program that comes with their hard drive upgrade kit called "EZGig II” that bitwise drive cloning, so you can upgrade to a larger drive without data loss. I use this software to backup my drive. Recently my hard drive broke so I installed a spare drive from an external drive that I…

I bought this to replace the drive in my Mac Mini. The Mini turned out to be beyond salvage, so I popped the drive into an external USB enclosure and now use it as a portable backup drive for my MacBook. It's surprisingly quiet and surprisingly fast for a budget drive.

So far so good, I bought this for my OLD laptop as the original drive failed but I couldn't use it for its intended purpose as the internal DVD drive too long is gone, and that's combined with the fact that I couldn't find any of the recovery discs that were unusable. (You can't install Windows XP from an external CD/DVD drive! That's another reason why a Mac is better! Anyway, I bought an external Vantec case from Revain and installed it there to take it between one mac and another pc to share

I bought this hard drive as a larger replacement for an original unit that I destroyed by pressing in the wrong place on the bottom of my laptop. It was easy to install, installed my operating system seamlessly, and was a very reliable device. The speed has increased compared to my old hard drive which is great. I bought another one for my brother's laptop when he needed more space. We then bought a third for another laptop in the family.

I bought this drive to replace a similar slightly larger drive in my Fit-PC Slim that had failed due to overheating. It was the cheapest PATA laptop hard drive I could find at the time. Works well, runs quietly and doesn't get too hot. 5200 RPM is not as fast as 7200 RPM, but the slower speed results in less noise and heat. My only buyer problem is that 160GB doesn't seem like big enough when you can buy a 250GB drive for around $20.

This drive replaced a failed hard drive in my old PowerBook G4, had few options for new laptop PATA drives and Revain had the cheapest price. Read/write noise is low and this drive is slower than the old 60GB Toshiba it replaced. I agree with other reviews, expensive compared to SATA, but then again, it's better to breathe new life into an old laptop than to throw it away.