WD3000HLFS

The WD3000HLFS is an Enterprise Storage class hard disk drive manufactured by the Western Digital Corporation in 2011. It is part of their VelociRaptor range of drives with a speed of 10,000 rpm, and sustained data transfer rate of 126 MB/s between the host and drive. This 3.5-inch drive has a SATA 3 Gb/s interface and is compatible with desktop computers.

Review

If you are looking for high speeds and high reliability then this drive is one of the best. When bought new, the manufacturer offered a 5-year warranty. It has an MTBF rating of 1.4-million hours, which is one of the highest for disk drives. The spindle speed is 10,000 rpm, which is about as good as it gets for desktop drives. This hard disk requires 5 V DC at 0.95 A, and 12 V DC at 0.30 A, therefore its power consumption is very small.

Removing the IcePack™ Heatsink

Although the actual drive is 2.5-inch in size, it comes enclosed in an IcePack™ mounting frame that behaves as a heatsink keeping it cool. This frame is also backplane compatible for use in high-performance desktop chassis. As you can see, there are four screws at the base of this frame, which secures the drive. A sealing sticker covers one of the screws to prevent the user separating the drive.

The heatsink sometimes increases the noise level of the drive and many people remove it if they do not like the clicking noise. However in order to do that, you will have to break the sealing sticker which then voids the warranty.

Jumper Settings

For the standard configuration, there are no jumpers added. Usually the jumper settings are for enabling Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC), setting the SATA interface, and enabling Advanced format option for Windows XP and older systems.

eBay / Cost

I bought this used drive for approximately ten pounds on eBay because I remembered using it in a desktop back in 2011, and it performed very well. With this drive, you get the speed but also the reliability and they run very cool due to the low power consumption. Back then, an adaptive cache buffer made all the difference, and this drive is full of innovations.

Used Enterprise Storage class drives tend to have high Power ON times because a good IT Manager will replace them after 5 years of use. However if you can get a used one that has had less use then it can be a bargain. You will have to check the SMART parameters to discover the number of hours logged by the drive.