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Rating: 
Summary: Poor reliability and short warranty period
Review: Drive went bad in less than two years and their warranty is only good for one year. The kind of company that makes hard drives they expect to fail after one year is not the kind of company I want to trust with my data.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow is this thing fragile.
Review: Great performance, quiet, has a glass jaw (if it were a brawler in a back alley). My computer crashed recently and took the hard drive with it. Though several other components like a TV tuner card and a SCSI card died I didn't expect the hard drive to go south. And I heard from a guy at a computer store near here that hard drives above a certain GB (80 GB I think) from any brand are known to have severe problems. And when they have them boy do they have them. It'll take me $300 to #500 to send it to a data recovery lab and get my data back. And I'm debating if it's worth it.
UPDATE: I finally bought data recovery program from OnTrack and, miraculously, that did the trick of saving my data to a different HD. Shortly after that the HD truely died. It would cause my computer to sound an alarm for the S.M.A.R.T. system at start up. YIKES! Don't worry, it was a problem limited to the hard drive only. Maybe if I kept it hooked up to the motherboard it would do something horrible in the future. But as soon as it took a swan dive I sent it in for a replacement. Now I have the hard drive on a IDE to USB adapter connected to a USB 2.0 card. I'm not taking any chances. While it's nice to have a warehouse of data storage on my computer currently I will be shopping around for a different brand or maybe a WD newer model known to be reliable.
Rating:
Summary: Dazzling performance but questionable reliability
Review: I purchased my WD 250G 8mb ATA drive (WD2500-JB which is identical to the retail kit) about 2.5 years ago. It had dazzling performance and was relatively quite. Not unexpectedly, it would get quite hot so I mounted it in a temperature controlled fan based hard disk cooler. The HD worked flawlessly for about 2 years until the SMART warning went off. XP's built in scandisk indeed found one corrupted file on the disk.
I contacted WD for a replacement and it promptly arrived 3 days later. I installed the replacement drive and copied over my files from the original problem disk. However after one day of use the new disk suddenly, and without warning, made a series of loud clunking sounds and crashed hard. The computer would not even recognise the disk after reboot.
I contacted WD again and they promptly shipped me a new disk. It was a VERY good thing I had not yet shipped back the original hard disk as I was planning to wait for 20 days to see how the replacement held up. I installed the new "replacement for the replacement" hard disk and copied all the files over to it. I then ran scandisk on the first-original hard disk. It successfully fixed that one file that was corrupted so, in the end, I was able to save ALL my files.
In conclusion I am at least happy that didn't loose any of my important data. The new disk has, so far after 3 months, been running flawlessly and I can only hope, that "third times a charm," the new disk proves to be as reliable as western digital's past products (Knock on wood).
Rating: 
Summary: warranty info wrong
Review: The 7200rpm 8mb cache Western Digital JB line of hard drives are the best that money can buy. Though they run at ATA100 and not ATA133 like the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus series, the benchmarks for the Western Digitals are quite impressive in read time and transfer rate. Many of its competitors use a smaller 2mb cache (the buffer between your drive controller and the physical drive heads), WD's 8mb cache makes a big difference which can be proven by just comparing the 2mb version from the same manufacturer. Reliability is a factor that is very crucial when hard drives are concerned. Even if you have a 3 or a 5 year warranty on your drive, if it fails generally all data is lost and it must be sent back to be replaced. In that unfortunate situation you are without the use of your computer for as much as 2 to 3 weeks waiting on an RMA. In the industry I work, we use many flavors of drives from 15k rpm U320 SCSI drives to all sizes of IDE. I have in depth experience with every brand available on the market. We have hundereds of each unit from Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Fujitsu, etc, and the best competitor on this market to Western Digital is the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus. We unfortunately have seen a very high failure rate among the DiamondMax Line, upwards of 10%. I have 3 large 2 terrabyte arrays built with these Western Digitals that come under heavy strain (approximately 16 hours a day of maximum reading and writing), I have only seen one failure that was fixed with firmware update. Firmware being an update pushed out to the drive to fix on board controller issues. For more information about benchmark comparisons, check storagereview.com
Rating: 
Summary: Solid performance and reliability
Review: The 7200rpm 8mb cache Western Digital JB line of hard drives are the best that money can buy. Though they run at ATA100 and not ATA133 like the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus series, the benchmarks for the Western Digitals are quite impressive in read time and transfer rate. Many of its competitors use a smaller 2mb cache (the buffer between your drive controller and the physical drive heads), WD's 8mb cache makes a big difference which can be proven by just comparing the 2mb version from the same manufacturer. Reliability is a factor that is very crucial when hard drives are concerned. Even if you have a 3 or a 5 year warranty on your drive, if it fails generally all data is lost and it must be sent back to be replaced. In that unfortunate situation you are without the use of your computer for as much as 2 to 3 weeks waiting on an RMA. In the industry I work, we use many flavors of drives from 15k rpm U320 SCSI drives to all sizes of IDE. I have in depth experience with every brand available on the market. We have hundereds of each unit from Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Fujitsu, etc, and the best competitor on this market to Western Digital is the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus. We unfortunately have seen a very high failure rate among the DiamondMax Line, upwards of 10%. I have 3 large 2 terrabyte arrays built with these Western Digitals that come under heavy strain (approximately 16 hours a day of maximum reading and writing), I have only seen one failure that was fixed with firmware update. Firmware being an update pushed out to the drive to fix on board controller issues. For more information about benchmark comparisons, check storagereview.com
Rating:
Summary: warranty info wrong
Review: the warranty on this drive is one year...not three. WD changed it's warranty period a couple of months ago.
Despite reviews around the net this drive has no controller card as those shipped by WD after October.
Rating:
Summary: Drive failed within three months; warranty support was poor
Review: This high-capacity, high on-drive memory drive died catastrophically without warning after only three months of use. I had backed up the most critical data, but discovered that using any data recovery service completely voids the Western Digital warranty.
Usually, hard drives have on-board diagnostics which give you at least a little warning of a physical problem, but this drive's diagnostics did not warn me. Also, frequently you have some phsical warning of impending failure--odd performance, or lost files. However, sudden crashes like mine are not unheard of, just not right away in newer drives.
WD is a premier manufacturer, but my experience has been poor.
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