WD2500AAKX

The WD2500AAKX is a SATA 6 Gb/s desktop hard disk drive manufactured by the Western Digital Corporation in approximately 2011. It is part of their Caviar Blue range of drives with a sustained data transfer rate of 126 MB/s, and rotational speed of 7200 rpm.

SATA drives usually do not have jumper settings for master/slave configuration and a single SATA cable supports a single drive. An alternative version of this drive is WD2500AAJB, which is a PATA drive with a parallel IDE interface, and these drives have jumper settings.

Review

The WD Blue brand is specifically for desktop applications providing speed and reliability; however, it cannot be used in business critical RAID environments because the firm does not provide warranty for such use. Hence, in those environments, you need to use their Enterprise series of drives.

If you have been using lower capacity slow drives in your desktop, then you will find that this one is very fast in comparison. Although the SATA specification is backward compatible, you will get the most benefit if your motherboard supports SATA 6 Gb/s or at least SATA 3 Gb/s.

eBay / Cost

Refurbished drives are usually for sale on eBay for a few pounds, and if you decide to buy a pre-used drive, then make sure it comes from a desktop computer and not a server or personal video recorder (PVR), where the Power-On Hours value tends to be high.

Some sellers flog drives that are reaching the end of their useful life, and although the drive will work fine, it is not much of a bargain if the SMART parameters indicate only 20 hours of useful life left! There are many programs on the Internet that will allow you to see the SMART attributes of your hard drive and you should therefore thoroughly check the drive before you decide to use it.