Product Description

Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB Caviar Sata 7200 Rpm 16MB Cache SATA Hard Drive

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WD5000AAKS
• Dimensions: 1.00" h x 4.00" w x 5.80" l, 1.40 pounds
• Hard Disk: 500GB

Features

• Capacity - 500G
• SATA
• 16M CACHE
• 7200 RPM
• 3.5 Inch

Customer Reviews

WD 5000AAKS hard drive
This is a really good hard drive. It boots up very quietly and holds tons of files. I didn't have to use any software to get it to work with my computer so it didn't matter that it didn't come with any software. would definitely buy one again.

Great drive
Fast and quiet drive at a great price. Windows did not recognize the drive at first, but after downloading their setup utility from the WD site, it was a snap. Be warned though it doesn't come with any cables. Some people have written that theirs' did, and some have written that it did not. Play it safe and order a SATA data and power cable just in case if you don't have any spares.

Entry level RAID drive.
This is Western Digital's entry level SATA RAID drive. It generally costs about $10 higher than the AACS even though the specifications look exactly the same. What the extra $10 buy is special software engineering going into the firmware, which makes sure that the drive will not go incommunicado for longer than a few milliseconds. Ordinary drives have no such safeguards and the RAID controller can possibly mistaken the temporary lack of responsiveness as a drive failure. Once the controller marks the drive as failed, it has to be reformatted and everything on it is as good as gone. This is an inconvenience in RAID 5 or RAID 1, and a fatal blow in RAID 0.

I bought two of these and put them in RAID 0 configuration. This RAID array serves as the only storage system. The setup is rather risky and therefore necessitates frequent backups. On the other hand, the performance is phenomenal, approaching that of the 10k RPM drive while costing a fraction of the price.