Horrible reviews. Besides the obvious lack of performance, lots of DOA and short life reports on this one.

I have this, no problems whatsoever

I've had no problems with mine either.

I have had absolutely no problems with this drive.
I don't even own one, but I definitely have not had any problems with it.

I thought these are the most reliable, with the worst brands being Hitachi, Fujitsu and Samsung, and Seagate being pretty awful too after years of being the most reliable. Even the best have a fairly lousy failure rate, something like 2 or 3% during the first year. The worst brands can apparently reach 10% and more.

Mine work's just fine thank you.

Mine lasted about 6 months then started making some terrible screech noises. I was able to backup my data, sent it back to WD under warranty. They sent me a 1.5TB drive in return, so I'm not complaining too much.

I own the 1.5 tb version. I will never, ever, ever buy one of these things again. You can google the problems associated with the HORRIBLE read/write times if you're so inclined. I'm pretty luck as I get a whopping 2 mb/s transfer rate if I'm moving files around. This is my "media center" hard drive so transfering music and movies over is a weekend event because each movie takes a good hour to transer over.

The only problem with these drives is that retards are using them with Windows XP without reading the friggin instructions.

These drives have 4k sectors, and if you don't go through the proper procedure to use them with older versions of Windows XP, home server, 2003 server, etc) performance will suck.

It's not just XP like WD claims. I'm using mine as an external HDD for a Dish Network receiver and it's considerably slower than a standard drive at times. That could only be because the DN receiver didn't format it right. According to WD only XP has alignment problems but it's just not true. I'm sure DN uses some type of Linux system which WD claims doesn't have alignment problems. When the drive doesn't even transfer at regular speeds using USB, that's pretty bad. It doesn't really bother me since I just start the transfer and do whatever else while it's transfering.

Just don't believe WD when they say only XP has alignment problems, that's B/S.

Yes, it's true that it's not just XP. Earlier versions of the linux kernel exhibit the same problem. I'm sure lots of other older operating systems would have the same issue. I could see it being feasible that embedded linux appliances like DVRs and the like are running older (more stable, well-tested) kernels.

That doesn't make it the drive's fault though. Know what you're buying and know how to use it. Giving a brand new piece of hardware a bad review because your 10 year old OS doesn't work with it well is misleading at best.

It may be the DN receiver or it may be the HDD dock. All I know is it's definitely slower than the standard drives I've used at times. I don't think it's always slower, just sometimes. I haven't actually timed transfers for a while. I just know when I start transfers the receiver gives an estimated time and any other drive I can knock off about 10-20 minutes off that time, this drive often takes longer than the initial estimate. It wasn't like that from the start, the fuller it gets, the worse it gets.

You guys know that the Green drives are slower on purpose right? They use less energy. WD has several different labels, Green is the low power label which spins at 5405 RPMs.

Black label = high performance (faster)
Blue = mainstream (normal)
Green = low power (slower)

They aren't slower than USB. When they have transfer speed problems using USB it's obviously alignment, not drive RPMs.

Bottom line - there is no reason to buy the EARS drives. They are no faster than others, pose additional concerns if not formatted correctly and on a system supporting that formatting, have deliberately disabled TLER support, and aren't much if any less costly when compared against other 1TB on sale.