As a guy who creates a minimum of 16gbs of content a week (producing podcasts and radio).... 1tb fills up really fast.

For media professionals.... I'm on the really really low end.

bah, i'd rather have a 200gb drive for $20. i wonder what the percentage of people out there actually use that much space? it can't be that much...didn't tr have a poll on that a while ago?

The percentage of DOA in the review seems alarming

I have a hard time believing that the WD green drives are going to wear out sooner because of high parking rates. If the spindle bearings can handle literally billions of rotations, why should a few hundred thousand repeats on an extremly lightly loaded mechanism cause failure. WD engineers are not stupid.

In another vein, I bought a couple of 500mb Green WD's for my wife and stepdaughter's computers. I wanted something with low vibration because their cases (Lian Li PC-V600s) have hard mounted drives. I later bought a Hitachi 1 TB for my own upgrade. I found the 7200rpm Hitachi appears to run just as quiet, cool, and vibration free as the 5400rpm WD Green. Plus it's way faster.

Right now the Hitachi 1Tb is only $75 on Newegg. I have never had any problems with Hitachis.

If you put a power efficient 3.5" in an external enclosure, would the AC Adapter still be required? I want to get an external hd, a 1TB would be nice but i dont want to deal with the AC Adapter, and the USB powered 2.5's max out at 500gb.

Thanks for the heads up, Cyril. I will pick up two of them now, and next month probably a Lacie 2Big (haven't decided on eSATA or NAS) external RAID box to give them a nice home.

The new 1TB Samsung 5,400 RPM drive, which uses two 500GB platters, is back in stock for $80 at Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152173

One problem with HDDs in general now seems to be the high failure rates. This has necessitated regular back up of data. Now when I started out on PCs around 5 years ago, HDDs came in 40GB for budget CPUs and backup could easily be taken on DVDs. And that HDD, a Maxtor, was still running when I last saw it.
Thing is, how to take back up of data in very large capacity drives like 500GB+? I recently lost a 'cuda 11 500GB to the infamous firmware bug. Backing it up on another internal HDD is clogging up the SATA slots without additional free capacity. Though all 3 HDDs I lost were Seagates, I've been holding back on the WD green for one main reason- I've seen numerous posts that state that the WD-G is warrantied upto 300,000 LCC and the LCC of this drive is very high, going over 135,000 in 4 months?
Anyone have any idea about this issue, especially anyone who's LCC has crossed fairly past the 300k mark?

All from what I've read elsewhere...

There is a concern about this drive about a periodic loud park noise/increase wear&tear in some cases.

I've heard the WD Green has an annoying auto-park feature that is triggered after a few seconds of idle. This saves a bit of power (1 watt?) but is noted to be quite noisy (way noiser than seek for example).
This isn't much of an issue for most ... except if the drive is woken up from the park state periodically (reported for some Linux setups, drive monitoring software such as speedfan, etc.).
Some have commented that those with the periodic wake then auto park problem, it might significantly shorten the life of the drive.
There is a way to disable it but it WD apparently has stated that doing so will void the warranty. Also WD apparently claimed that the drive can handle way more auto-parks than specified (some have reached the maximum stated auto-park limit in a few months).
The new firmware for the drive now hides the auto-park activity from the SMART report, perhaps to defuse the issue, but those that listen to the drive, say it is still doing it, despite it not being reported.

My personal concern, that hasn't yet been answered, is if the periodic wake-up problem occurs with items like the DLink DNS-323 as have heard some other similar devices (with Linux) do have the problem.

Using the same coupon, the WD Caviar Black 1TB is US$ 89.99 -- not quite the deal in cost per gigabyte, but certainly a deal for top-of-the-line performance.

is that true? How did you make that conclusion?
I made a mistake, this should be a reply for #10. Is there away to move it there?

They've "unearthed" the promo code? It's right at the top of Newegg's computer hardware page -.-

Picked up a WD Caviar Black 640gb today for $67.50 with free shipping. That's a great deal. Happy Father's Day to me!!

Thanks for the headsup on the HD promo code, I got the email about it. I ordered a HD yesterday and given my location it was delivered today and Newegg applied the promo code to that order after a quick chat. I'd say I'm a pretty good and consistent customer but resolutions like that are why I KEEP shopping there.