WD Caviar drives

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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I thought I would sign up today since I read some reviews on the Caviar Black on Amazon regarding the 1TB drives, I just bought two 2 TB drives as the 1TB drive is no longer large enough for my storage needs.

I’d like to say I’ve been a WD customer for at least the last 18 years- since I switched over to Mac boxes, since I switched to Mac the only drives I’ve ever used for them as well as external backups has  been the caviar line.

I use my machines hard every day, usually one daily user and a server, I never shut them off since I feel it’s better to keep it at the same operating temperature 24/7 and anyway, I’m on the thing all the time so it’s stupid to shut down. Only time they go off is during a storm/power failure, but even now with a backup power supply that’s no longer the case.

By hard running, I typically will have 1-3 different browsers open to multiple tabs and pages, an OpenSim viewer which uses a LOT of resources and also has voice chat in it, music player, email, text editor, image editor  and more all open and in use, typically it all will be running at almost the max ram and the quad core processors according to the OSX activity monitor.

The server runs OpenSim 24/7 and happens to be a used refurbished Dell Workstation purchased for that dedicated purpose and it runs Linux Mint.

Anyway, my experience with WD drives has been 100% perfect for 18 years so far, I’ve never had one drive fail in any way for any reason whatsoever, these caviar drives are rock solid!

Maybe my methods have a lot to do with it too, so here’s some tips on how I run my machines:

  1. Any time I buy a new  to me Mac (I always buy used on Ebay) I always put in a new WD Caviar drive no matter what’s in the machine when it arrives (usually some old 300 gb size Seagate, Maxtor or somesuch junk)

  2. I usually try to double my machines’ specs every time I buy a “new” machine on Ebay,  about every 18 months to 2 years I do that.

  3. I take the machine I would be currently using hard daily over that 18 months-2 years, clone that drive to the “new” machine and then relegate the now “old” machine to backup archive storage,  it’s turned off and stored away.

In addition I have 4-5 external drive cases each with a WD caviar drive, and these are used to periodically back up the daily user machine, the daily user machine also has a file backup in a folder as well as 1-2 other drives in it that are also for backups that are unmounted between backing up to them.

So I have at least  8 full copies of my critical daily user files and contents plus older, incremental backups that would be in those decommissioned machines I have stored away.

No daily user and it’s drive gets used daily 24/7 longer than about 2 years, dust gets blown out periodically though my machines are all installed on a shelf in the basement where it’s cooler, dry and clean (I have dogs, and dog hair is murder on computers!)

Make sure you have a quality surge protector and replace it periodically! they do not last indefinitely and when those go bad you never know it because they don’t interrupt the power in any way. Even better to have a backup battery power supply the surge protector is plugged into, I love mine and it’s saved me from several power outages.

So that is my method for how I manage my machines and hard drives, it along with the quality WD drives is why I have never had a drive fail or lost any data, should one eventually fail for some reason, I’d have at least 8 duplicate backup copies plus- anyway, so it wouldn’t be a huge problem.

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Hello and welcome to the community.

Thank you very much for sharing the way that you take care of the WD Drives, this is an amazing way to keep your computer running and taking care of your data and drives

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Thanks a lot lluna!

Hope the techniques I use will help someone get the most out of their drives and keep their data SAFE!

I did once try a SSD on my daily user about a year ago, it was made by Samsung and it came with good reviews, but it was a big mistake! I was going to use it just for my OS and it was indeed a faster than a mechanical drive, but very soon it started having problems, it’s been a year and I don’t remember now what the problems were exactly, but I called their customer support line and the CSR did indeed tell me it sounded like their SSD was failing and that I could return it and they would send a new one under warrantee.

I thought about that a few seconds and you might be surprised what I told the guy… I told him no, no thanks, I don’t want another SSD drive to replacing the failing one I just bought. I wound up removing the failing SSD and putting my mechanical WD back in and just biting the $100 or whatever it was on the  Samsung SSD, I didn’t want to deal with the replacement failing too, it was obvious to me there was a problem in that line/brand/technology/whatever and no guarantee the replacement wont do the same thing too.

So that ends my foray into the SSD for a long time! maybe some day in the future when the technology has the bugs worked out of it I’ll look again for using it for my OS.