Reviews for WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: None

Weakness: everything

Bought drive 6 month ago, makes a clicky noise and locks whole system, never experience this with my maxtor drives I have own in the past, and if you did not know WD changed their policy now if your over 90 days of purchase they wont provide tech support, unless you pay them. Which I did not realize when I bought drive. Dont buy this drive from the other reviews it looks like I am not the only person who is unhappy with this drive.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: fast

Weakness: breaks

I had two of these drives die in two months. Do not buy this drive unless you buy two... maybe three, so that WHEN they die, you have your data backed up. Hope they dont all die at the same time.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Quiet, fast, cheap, 3 year warranty

Weakness: Has problems working in conjuction with other drives running a slaves. No Disk (you need to download software from online before you install)

Sound is quieter than you CPU fan. There was a speed improvement over my maxtor 40 gig, feels like 20%, I beleive this is the best product for the price. Just shop around for the best $ deal. I was initialy woried about reliability, it is estimated that 1 in 10 of these HD's fail soon after purchase or arrive DOA. This is certainly no worse than any other manufacturer. Quality for the budget minded

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: SUPER QUIET, REALLY FAST, ZERO-VIBRATION, 8MB Cache, 7200RPM, Lots of space, The Best Hard Drive

Weakness: I have hated Western Digital Drives ever since, cause I owned 3 WD Caviars (2GB, 4GB, and 6GB) they all failed on me.

I just gave this drive a try, cause I have been hearing very excellent reviews about it. Bought it for $172 at www.essencompu.com, and, geeeeez this is the best drive I have ever owned. Before this, I bought 2 Maxtor 6L080L4, and they were noisy, even having the FDB motors, but the WD1200JB drive is sooo quiet, i cannot hear it working actually. That's what I expected from my maxtors, but they're not. I did not see the improvements also of using ATA133 on those maxtors, but on these WD drives, even using ATA100, i have seen the difference. It is really faster in performance. I have turned on my computer, while holding the drive and did not even hear it or felt it vibrating or something, unlike my Maxtor 80GB, it clunked and clunked and clunked and vibrated... I have been a Maxtor fan for a long time, and if WD makes better drives now (unlike my old drives) I would highly recommend WD's. I have to wait for my drive to last.

Now, Maxtor have released their 8MB Cache drives too, and I am still waiting for it to mature before deciding on my second hard drive purchase, would it be a Maxtor or WD 120GB 8MB Cache? The diff on these drives are the ATA, where the Maxtor uses ATA133 and the WD uses ATA100. On Paper, of course, the Maxtor would perform better given the same Cache size and better ATA133, but its possible noise makes me think twice. I need to find more reviews of the new Maxtors before making any decision.

Go for this WD's, you will not be disappointed.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: It's fast.

Weakness: Totally unreliable. Failed after 4 months.

This is my second drive. The first one failed after 1 year. The second after 4 months. Getting RMA from the website was simply. I only use the advance placement option. I've never had good experiences with repair option from any company due to the long wait of repair/replacement. I recommend to stay away from this drive. The cost of lost data and time is not worth it. I owned and have own many WD drives but this is ridiculous.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Very fast and cheap.

Weakness: Very noisy after using for 1 year.

I have had this disk for more than 1 year. At the very beginning, the drive was very quiet. However, it is very noisy and sometimes fails to enter the operating system. I checked the S.M.A.R.T info and it said spin up time error and seek time error. Sometimes it just breaks down all my work and stops responding.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: none

Weakness: Two separate drives died on me. Very unreliable

I would not recommend purchasing any drive by western digital unless you are only interested in keeping your data for a couple of months until the drive dies on you too!!!

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: very fast, very quiet

Weakness: nothing so far

I love this drive. I am a previous Maxtor user but now I think I'll stick with WD. I hate noise and this drive is whisper quiet. I highly recommend this drive.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: SUPER FAST. SUPER QUIET. SUPRE BIG.

Weakness: none.

This drive is "GOD". I have had 2 of those in my own computer for over 3 months. This drive is definitely superb to Maxtor drives. I myself have been sticking to Maxtor over the years and I had to use their warranty twice (once to replace an old 6G drive, and the second time to replace the 80GB ATA 133 7200RPM drive). So I gave WD a try this time.

First of all, 8MB Cache DOES make a whole lot difference in speed. I did not believe when people say that this babe is faster than most 10000RPM SCSI drives until I got 2 of them myself. It is truly lightning fast, (much faster than the Maxtor ATA 133 7200RPM DX-740 series). Secondly, this drive is SUPER-quiet. You virtually don't feel it (let alone hear it) when it is working. Usually, hard drive noise is annoying when you do the drive-to-drive backup. You can hardly sleep if you leave the computer on and do the backup. With this one, the only thing you can hear is, well, the fans in your computer. You don't hear the drives. You can tell it is doing the heavy writing thing only from the blinking IDE LED indicator on your computer case.

So definitely go for it if you need the space/speed.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Very noticeable speed improvement

Bought this as a primary drive for my Dell Dimension 4400. I see a very noticeable speed improvement compared to the Western Digital 40GB drive with 2MB buffer. My MS office applications run much quicker and boot times are even faster. There is a good detailed review of this drive at www.tomshardware.com. Worth the extra money for the 8MB buffer.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Has great storage capacity

Weakness: Noisiest drive I have ever had. This is the second Caviar drive I have owned, and by far the worst. Also confusing and conflicting documentation out of the box regarding jumper settings etc.

This was the second of 2 Caviar drives. I have not been impressed with either. They are noisy and cantancerous, and frequently lock up. Western Digital has yet to pay the rebates on both drives, so don't use the rebate as a reason to purchase this drive.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: very fast tons of space

Weakness: a bit costly

First off the WD1200JB is basiclly the WD1200BB, except that it has a buffer that is 4x bigger. to your average person that may not matter. but that buffer increases the speed of your transfers and access times. not only is it the fastest ATA 100 drive around, it also outpreforms most scsi drives! SCSI (scuzzy) has been know for it's speed for a long time. if you don't want or need the speed buy the WD1200BB for the same amount of space and less $$$. but if you want it, buy it! did i mention that it's faster then some 15,000 rpm drives? also it is a resonably quiet drive and resonably cool.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: 8mb buffer, wd reliability, fast, price

Weakness: none

I've used these (10 to date, plus 2 of the 200gb version) for primary and backup drives. I particularly recommend them for raid drives. My systems are used for video production and graphics manipulation and these drives provide the backbone that keeps my projects delivered on time and with quality. As other computers in the house need replacement drives, these are the drives I look for - avidly.

The 8mb buffer demonstrates remarkable difference in speed (compared to a 2mb buffered drive) that shows without hesitation while rendering graphics. Data integrity has been exceptional. I will continue to purchase these drives (especially as the prices get better!) and recommend them highly to all.

Buy this drive - you ~will~ be back for another!

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: None

Weakness: Failed after 6 months.

This is the second Western Digital hard drive I've had fail recently that was less then 1 year old. No more Western Digital hard drives for me.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Works great. No problems with my pair (I have two).

Weakness: NONE for me but, sounds like there was a bad batch. Oh, also, ALL MANUFACTURER's now only offer 1 year warranties for RETAIL or 90 day for OEM consumer class Hard Drives; not just Western Digital.

This is just a quick lesson in Hard Drives for the less knowledgeable who posted below. All Hard Drives are sold as 1 MB = 1,000,000 Bytes by the manufacturers. That means ALL MANUFACTURERS, including Western Digital, are using a DECIMAL number capacity counting format. But, as you may or may not know, Bytes are actually BINARY UNITS and are actually multiples of 1,024 (2^10) not 1,000 (10^3). So, this drive is 120 GB (Decimal Size in Decimal Units) which is equivalent to 111 GB (Binary Size in Decimal Units).

If you build it or upgrade it yourself you should keep this information somewhere handy so you can convert.

CONVERSIONS: Hard Drive Size [Decimal size in Decimal units] * (10^9 [Decimal Gigabyte] / 2^30 [Binary Gigabyte]) = Actual Hard Drive Capacity

SO: 120GB * (10^9 / 2^30) = 111 GB

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Quiet, cheap, 3 year warranty, great for general use

Weakness: Absolutely unsuitable for server use or any other write intensive application

I have bought 3 of these drives so far because it was cheap and had decided to give WD a second chance. The first one I bought was in September of 2002, that on died in November of the same year.
Since I do remember that some drives do come in as being slightly defective out of the factory I decided "Hey, a fluke." Went out and bought 2 more in November 2002.
It is now July 2003 and the 2 drives I bought in November died last week.
True I do put harddrives throught their paces faster than normal but now that I think about it, if a drive can't last for more than 6 months it isn't a really worthwhile item.
Also 3 drives bought at seperate times (2 in November were bought a week apart) end up failing within 6 months is a bit too much of a coincidence.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Fast, reasonable

Weakness: none

Have had 4 of these drives for over 2 years now and not experienced any problems with any of them. Use them in pairs for video editing.
Had many other drives, but for me its WD or I dont buy it.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Fast and Silent

Weakness: Failed after 1 week

BEWARE, BEWARE, BEWARE. This drive failed after 1 week of operation. Check out the reviews, there are a high percentage of these drives going bad in 1 to 3 months. You can get it replaced, but how about the time and data loss? The Maxtor or Seagate are more reliable. It will be a long time before I buy another WD.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Very Large hard drive for a cheap price, very quiet, very fast.

Weakness: formated it is only 111GB not 120GB

Great HD, works well with my other 40GB and 15GB. I needed alot of extra storege for video editing so i went with this HD. It works well for video editing and is very fast. The only problem i can see with this hard drive is that it is not 120GB it is only 111GB. Other then that it is a good buy and i would suggest it to anyone who needs a ton of hard drive space. I am planing to build a 3.0GHz machine this summer and I will be purchasing one of these again for it.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Strong body, fast enough, easy to install. (lover than 137GB)

Weakness: HD Tach 2.61 read and write performance result sometimes decrease to 10 MB, not so perfect for AV montage.

Well surprisingly JB series is underperforming than the BB series at top notch reading (about 0.5MB lower) but long term average performance of JB is better. I have bought a 20GB BB too to my sister and it beat my 120 GB at reading. Another thing is that 20GB model is not dropping below 20MB at reading speed. (I knoced down...) To search this I opened both of them and generally seen same things except the 15uf 35 Volt Tantalum Capacitor on JB near the motor contacts. At BB there is a no info written smaller capacitor. I carefully removed the part and tested it with a Capacitymeter and it give me 10uf. Surprising!.. (If you want to test yourself be careful to put a mark at it's polarity because nothing is written, otherwise it bumps.) I didn't satisfied with the JB's 15uf capacitor and put a 22uf 35Volt tantalum capacitor. The result is a little bit better now, at HDTach average reading is over 40MB previously 38,5MB at WinXP, but do not try this if you are not much familiar with those jobs. This gave the motor a little bit more power for the 3 plates. I tested the motor with hddspd21 at Win 98SE and it gave me 7220rpm. (Was 7198 before) Thats fine... But the drop to 10MB still occurs. I thing WDC HDD's are not so good at multiple disk performance. If you want this much storage capacity wait for 125GB per platter density to come and get much more average speed of more than 49MB/s (for 40GB platter) or 58MB/s (for 60GB per platter) designs with better tolerance.

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Goodbye WD!

Strengths: Looks

Weakness: Reliability

Died within the first 12 hours of use. This was a drive I bought just in case I'd need it and so by the time I got to using it, it was out of warranty, and WD did not even return my e-mail. All I was asking was for them to look at it and verify that it was as I said.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: easy instructions to follow

Weakness: don't see any...

A hard drive that runs quite well and easy of instructions make a snap to install and setup...runs pretty quiet and had a great rebate other than that it does what a harddrive should do...no big difference in speed even at 8meg cache...

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: It's very though and speedy. One of the best out there!

Weakness: The Data Lifeguard Tools for formatting and partitioning the HD does not work properly. It failed to set up my HD, had to use FDISK and FORMAT via DOS

When I said tough, I mean tough! My 2 year old son dropped it from 2 feet and I made sparks by accidentally plugging in the power cord when the CPU is on! But it still works without no problems! Stupid-proof! :) Great HD!

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Western Digital 200 JB GB drive

Strengths: Fast, reliable... lasts.

Weakness: None.

I have two computers... do a lot of video editing. Needless to say I've yet to have one fail on me and I let em chug away all night long and all day (rendering time takes 6-8 hours of continuous use). I have two in one machine, and one in the other. I like them so much I plan on getting another from newegg to back up the drive in my one machine with the single drive and for additional storage for video capture footage. I'm not sure what's going on with some of the drives you all have... but mine get used a lot... gaming, video editing, etc... no problems at all. I love these drives. If I'm lucky, I've been lucky a long time... drive 1 = 4 years, drive 2 = 3 years, drive 3 = 2 years. I say, intall two of whatever you choose, and ghost em on a regular basis... the warranty will cover the one that dies and down time is less than 5 minutes!

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Fast, reliable, and priced right

Weakness: none known

I have purchased many Western Digital hard-drives in the past ten years starting with my first 250MB. They have all worked fabulously and they're all still working in either my computers or computers I gave away.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Very fast, Very quiet, Very cheap...

Weakness: No ATA/133, hate how 120GB translates into 111GB formatted...

This hard drive is definitely one of the finer creations man has built recently because this beast is VERY FAST, VERY QUIET for its 'size'. I expected it to make alot more noise since even the smaller Western Digital drives used to make 'noise' but I got used to WD's cheap reliability. I have pretty much stuck with Seagate and Western Digital for YEARS, and they each have proven to be reliable for the price, since IBM is EXPENSIVE and MAXTOR is NOISY.
Just wish Western Digital made this with an ATA/133 interface although MOST applications never need this speed, but for those of us with HOME SERVES this is a bonus. Still, with ATA/100 it gives my SCSI a 'run' since this has the 8MB Cache so I am happy with it but my other pet peeve is the 'truth in advertising'. I doubt I am the ONLY ONE but it is annoying to see how they put 120GB, 180GB, 250GB but you are not really getting that much formatted. There might be that much in terms of BYTES but the overall 'size' will be alot smaller as the size increases once formatted due to the translation of 1024 bytes into KB into MB into GB... So just be prepared to see your drive 'shrink' by as much as 8% and more as you go up in size...
Finally, when is EVERYONE ELSE going to wrap their drives in anti-static rubber? Seagate has one of the 'coolest' ideas with that rubber coating, because it keeps it from slipping or 'charging' while moving around. Only minus is the heat trapped but they can work with BodyGlove to make something 'cool'.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Big Cheap and Quiet(er than my 80gb ibm)...

Weakness: Didn't notice any improvements over 80gb ibm 120gxp

I bought this harddrive at microcenter for $180 + $12 tax but it came with a $30 and $50 rebate. This was a retail package so all in all i saved 50 bucks not up front. When I installed it however, it was slower than my 80GB IBM 120GXP which had lower latency and better Sandra score. My computer is a 533 Celeron on Intel 810 chip with ATA66. I used the 80 cond. cable provided. The 1200JB brought no noticable improvement in performance but was more quiet than my IBM. In CS sometimes, texture loading latency would sky rocket from 120ish on my IBM to 3-400...but becomes 140ish when you have winamp on...Donno why but it doesn't matter for it's just textures...All in all it wasn't a real shocker like many ppl said it would be. I don't know about ATA100 performance...Anyways, i got a good deal that you can't find online so buy the hitachi 180gxp 120gb with 8mb because it is a better deal...i heard latency it up a liitle bit though...I would buy this drive again because i got the $80 discount making this extremely good deal...

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Space, quite.

Weakness: Poor performance.

Poor performance compared to SCSI U160, and very poor performance compared to U320. Good for home, poor for professional use. Slower than most of 4 MB cache SCSI U160 10K HDDs(e.g. Fujitsu MAN33xx series). Tested with Adaptec SCSI ctrls. ASC39160 & ASC39320R.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: a lot less noise than my previous drives,none of that chunking sound when it's reading

Weakness: none

I have a lot of video files from my camcorder which I need a lot of space for over 10 gigs per hour of high quality film , then there is the extra space you need when editting them,
this drive is just right for the job i can keep a lot of material on disk which gives me a greater choice on what goes into the final cut, I have had great fun with it made some comical video's of the relatives to the all time keep sake one's of the new born,wedding's ect,
also have gig's of mp3's /films
I'm going to be greedy and buy another one
""""""BUY 1""""""

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: QUIET! Just a slight "whir" until it was up to speed. COOL ! Using Western digitals disk diagonstic tools (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp), drive stayed cool to the touch.(Passed too!!)

Weakness: It only comes in one color scheme.. Silver and Black.. Why not use different color schemes? People are 'lighting up' the insides of there cases so why not make them in different colors? Show'em off!!

BEST HARD DRIVE EVER OWNED...
Found that in the past few weeks the price for this drive came down a bit on the internet.
IM GONNA GET ANOTHER ONE.
WESTERN DIGITAL HAS BEEN AROUND A LONG TIME.. THIS MEANS COMMITMENT TO CUSTOMERS..and HIGH QUALITY.


KB,
BSEE '77

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Fast. Big. Quiet

Weakness: none.

This is the best hard drive out there for the money right now. Period.

I bought an OEM model with no doc. Downloaded PDF installation guide from western digital website. Absolutely no problems to install.

NOTICABLEY faster than my other drives.

If you are going to buy a new hard drive, there is no reason not to buy this or another JB model from Western Digital.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: SUPER STABLE, FAST, QUIET

Weakness: None that I have experienced or heard of.

Added this to replace a Maxtor 40 gig on a system recently configured [12/01] w/Intel i850 mb, 1.7 Ghz, 512mb Rambus direct ram, running Win XP, Home Ed. Its much quieter and faster -- smoother, somehow, and very stable for all of my apps. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Worth the price.

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WD Caviar 120 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack - OEM

Strengths: Very fast and very stable

Weakness: none that I can see

We purchased two WD1200JB for primary HD. Running one with XP PRO on an ASUS A7V266-E mobo and the other with XP Pro on an ASUS A7V333 mobo. Both machines have Athlon XP2000 processers with PAL8045 ht sinks and Panasonic 80mm clg fans. We do video redering and other task that gobble speed and stability. These HD's are everything they are cracked up to be and we are very happy with the results. We will use more in the future without any hesitation.

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ReviewGist for Western Digital Caviar Special Edition WD1200JB 120 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive

Performance is Average according to 2 Hard Drive experts. -- "top-notch performance"-reviews.cnet.com -- "blazing performance."-reviews.cnet.com -- "designed to maximize desktop computer performance for activities requiring high-performance hard drives such as computer gaming, digital video editing, and file server applications."-reviews.digitaltrends.com Read more to find expert opinions on more...

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