Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have tons of WD drives and they've been around for awhile (including two 2tb 'green' drives), so I decided to give this one a chance even with the half/half ratings it had. This drive is great! Popped it into my esata dock, turned it on, and windows disk management saw it instantly, as the full ~2.7tb. Initialized it, making sure to pick GPT, and then formatted it. Windows saw the whole partition, no fuss. To test the drive, I did a low level format, then a disk check. When both came back fine, I copied as many files as I could fit on the drive, and then did another disk check. Came back fine again, so I ran DiskMark to see what speeds I was getting. When the drive was almost full (~3gb free), I was averaging around 30-40MBps. after I reformatted and ran the test again, I averaged ~60MBps. Compare this to a smaller hard drive and you will see that this is considerably slower. (I just ran DiskMark on a full WD 500GB drive that's about 5 years old, and it averaged 80MBps) However, 30MBps is plenty of speed to stream movies, which is what I'm using it for. This drive won't make the best boot drive, but it makes a great archival one. As I've only owned it for about a week now, I can't comment on long term reliability, but I will update if anything happens. For now, I do recommend this drive. Edit 11.15.11 After owning this drive for a couple of months now without any failures, it is a very attractive option. However, your mileage may vary, since mine seems to be a bit slower than a friend's who bought the same version (I was getting around 60-80MB/s while the drive was pretty full when I was copying files to his). All-in-all it's a good drive.