I'm in the market for a 500gig hard drive. I have a spare external enclosure here so I figured I'd look around for a drive and keep my options open regarding internal/external and as it turns out the drives I've been looking at are about the same price for internal and external.

I have a WD caviar operating inside my case and I have had no problems with it in the 2 years I've had it.

I also saw a WD Elements (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136080) drive that looks promising as well. It would be advantageous since I have other uses for the enclosure that I have here and was hoping to save it for another project. The one thing I noticed is that it's only a 1 year warranty. I've never had to use the warranty period at all on any WD drives so I'm not overly concerned about that.

I know brands repackage certain products and use them in various ways so does anyone know if the "elements" product line is just a name for the external version of the drive or is it a different quality drive altogether?

Basically I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with that line of drives or has taken one apart to see what it's actually made of.

any advice is appreciated

(note: normally i'm very partial to seagate, but my existing WD drives have proven themselves worthy and at the present time I can get a better price on the WDs)

Hi reasons, - not many takers here, so I'll add one from across the pond. I haven't looked at this closely (and don't have a WD external myself), but isn't Elements more like a budget line, while MyBook's the chic'er alternative? They're practically throwing them at you in supermarkets. Like you I don't know whether the drive inside is different either. Are you sure you want to go for another IDE drive, with SATA being de rigueur now (even if it's for external use)? No probs with my WD internals, although they tend to be a bit louder on idle than other makes (but discreet on seek).

thanks for responding

honestly, I've never felt an absolute need for sata. my current computer has no sata connectors, but you're probably right. even if i'm looking for external use, sata is about the same price and is gives me a bit of future-proofing in case i want to use it internally in a different box.

i missed the deal on the WD elements anyway (newegg sold out). It is a budget line, but I'm on a budget so hey...works great! I obviously didn't want to sacrifice quality which was why i was interested in experiences with them. the 250GB model seemed to get great reviews on the egg. I was wondering if the My Book line just looked nicer and had the one-touch backup and came with a bunch of useless software and this one didn't or something. I can't imagine WD producing too many totally different lines of drives if they're going to shove them in an external enclosure anyway. My hunch is that the elements external line is the older 8mb cache caviars but I obviously have no proof to back that up.

I'm holding off on the purchase anyway now. my mom got rushed to the hospital yesterday and things have been crazy since then so even though the link above is probably dead, I'm still interested in anyone's opinions or experiences with taking these things apart.

I would get Caviar SE16.

They now have a (already relatively) new series of Desktop HDDs, with "AA" letters in model numbers, like WD5000AAKS or WD1600AAJS.
I have WD4000AAKS, working on my VIA VT6421A PCI SATA/IDE Controller and it's great so far: awfully fast and REALLY QUIET. And I've tested its surface in http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/, got only two blocks of <50ms release time, the others were <3ms and <10ms . Hope that's not going to change

If you don't want SATA, you can get WD5000AAKB instead. The same as WD5000AAKS, the same 16MB cache, the same performance I guess, but only IDE.