Here is my experience with installing one. Anybody else have experience with these? I'm interested in hearing what you think of it.
I purchased this drive to replace the drive in my Wife's computer that was running out of space. The PC was running Windows 7 and the drive being replaced was a WD3200KS 7200RPM drive.
PC the drive went into: Stock Intel Q6600, Gigabyte GA-EP45-D3SL, 8GB DDR2, and a ATI HD4870.
The Windows install wasn't that old and I didn't really want to mess with getting her all her stuff back so I used a Clonezilla Live CD to clone the old drive to the new one. I then booted straight into Windows 7 off the new drive. Windows asked me to restart so I did and the system was up and running without incident. I then went into the Windows 7 disk manager and extended the partition to fill the whole drive.
Knowing this was an Advanced Format drive but unsure if the alignment would be correct due to the cloning, I downloaded the bootable image of the align utility from the Western Digital site and burned it to a CD. I ran the utility and it indicated that the partition was aligned correctly and there was nothing that needed to be done.
The old drive showed as a 5.4 and the new one as a 5.9 on the Windows Experience Index. I didn't think that was too bad coming from an older 7200 RPM drive to this. I was a little worried it would be slower but that isn't the case. I haven't personally used the PC enough myself to know but my wife says she notices it is a bit faster and things are quicker to load.
This drive for me was a worthwhile upgrade and money well spent to this point. Only time will tell about the reliability as with any drive.
