Windows 7: Western Digital 1TB Black Caviar

I just ordered this drive from TD, and I got to wondering if there is anything that I need to do different for it to be able to use the full capacity of the drive? I will probably partition the first 100GBs for adding another OS to my secondary rig, and the remainder in multiple partitions for archiving data.

There isn't anything special that you should have to do. As long as it your box recognizes the drive, you should get all of the capacity. A 1TB drive will show up as 931GB to Windows 7.

Hopefully it is formatted NTFS. Else do a Quick Format - unless you like an overnighter. Make sure you don't put 4 primaries on it - 3 primaries and one extended instead. Else you'll be stuck with 4 partitions. If you add another OS, unplug the other drive(s). Then you end up with a completely independent OS installation that you can switch to via the BIOS boot sequence. That is much more convenient than a double boot -- but whom am I telling all that. I bet you knew that all along. LOL Else it is just another disk.

I should be good to go then...thanks.

Mostly, but I wasn't aware that any harddrives were already formatted. I just assumed that they came totally blank out of the box.

I had a couple that were formatted - but those were external drives.

Just got the drive installed, and all is well...at least I didn't hear any clicks and it shows up in the BIOS and the OS, so "knocking on wood" I now have to put it to work.

They're good drives. I've had one in operation for about 6 months no issues. I've also got a 750 that's been running for about a year, again, no problems.

I hope so. If so, it will be the first good WDC that I've owned. The only reason that I went this route is because I got fed up with Seagate, and many have said that this is a good drive. Time will tell.

I've used nothing but Western Digital hard drives since 1998 and only had two go bad on me, and that was about 6 years ago. I think you'll be fine.