Under budget & time pressure I would take the cheapest WD (the best HDD brand for me) :)
Now, if the price diff is low, then the 7200rpm (In my opinion the speed difference is noticeable vs 5400rpm)
About cloning: I guess WD still offers Acronis True Image for free. Google "WD Acronis True Image"

I think the smallest hard disk made in recent years was just over 1TB so smaller sizes are those that have damage on the disk and more probably on the outer/faster area and then reformatted to 500MB or 750MB or so, meaning a 1TB HDD will have a better chance not to be so slow. A lot of HDDs are not optimised at all for use as OS drives anymore and may be slower than a seven year old drive for random reads and writes.

I have spare HDDs but it is not worth sending one to the USA.

I guess sometimes it can be worth saving an hour or two now at the risk of losing ten later troubleshooting strange problems.

Blacks are better quality on average....lasting longer and etc. That's partly why I picked it.


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Sadly my PC can only use up to a 500GB SSD, so I went with HDD....this one is faster, though, so I should hopefully see some noticeable improvement in seek times.

Dunno, but I know the 5400 RPM one I have atm is quiet, so I am hoping the 7200 RPM one won't be too noisy as well.


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Yeah, the WD Black was very cheap(59 dollars or so), so I went with that.

Would that work on an OS drive cloning/swap, and on non WD drives(I am cloning a toshiba drive to the new WD drive)?


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Have a teleporter? Wait, better not risk a demon invasion. o.0 ;)

Good advice, to be sure.

Yes it should. Remember I am 15 years rusty on cloning but on my times, the main control was paying the license upfront, and when not (gift/free/share_ware) was that at least one of the HDD should be the brand -gifting- the program.
A very good thing here is that the WD program must know perfectly the tech details of your receipient.

Good buy & good luck with the art of cloning, I hope you share your experiences :)

P.S I realize you avoided completely the Win11 theme... :P

Lol, maybe I should live stream ;D

I am kidding....still, I will share how it went once the drive is cloned and swapped(or the old drive put back in in the event it doesn't work....but I suspect it will).

Where? You mean in an old post? I'm guessing maybe I forgot or couldn't think of a reply at the time(if I skipped/missed something in a post).

As for Win11.....as I told someone else: i'm not really into it, and also can't run it on this machine anyways

Frankly, to me it sounds that trying to clone your current broken Windows installation, and then fix it afterwards, is probably much more work and stress than just simply re-installing Windows 10 from scratch to the new OS hard drive (using MS Media Creation Tool or whatever), and then over time copying any data you still need from that old broken hard drive to your new OS drive.

Plus, you get rid of all kinds of old crap, not transferring them to your new installation.

But, to each his own. That's how I'd do it anyway.

Can you tell me why there is such a limitation, because I've never heard of such? You're talking about a SATA SSD, right? You have no M.2 slot?

Even if 500GB is the maximum, I'd still go with an SSD. It really improves your OS performance a lot.