Nothing wrong with using as a non-OS drive, but since it's new I'd get it replaced too. It's not unheard of to be bad from the get-go, but why put up with even a little risk if you don't have to?
That drive issue drove me NUTS for longer than I care to admit until I learned more about how Vista/7 install.

UPDATE 2:

Guys thank you very much for the continued help and advice. I decided I don't really want to mess around with the 640gig drive and I bought a 1TB on sale ($79.99 I couldn't resist), another Western Digital Black Caviar, I installed it and Win7 installed without any problems at all. So I'm gonna use that! I'm returning the 640gig.

Now that the system is up and running, HOLY CRAP it is fast! I'm gonna have me lots of gamin' fun!

Thanks again for everything!

Congrats!

Those 1TB Caviar Black drives are pretty quick for such a large mechanical platter drive! I've got one for my games and data storage.

Hey Redhornet, what is your 'Windows Experience Index' on that WD drive, and is it a 7200 RPM or a 10,000 RPM?

I have two 500 GB, 7200 RPM drives in Raid 0 and I'm getting a 5.9 on my Primary HD, and that is my constraint - all the other components in my system rate at 7.9. I tried a Raid 1 config also and got the same 5.9 HD rating.

Thanks, WC

physical spinning drives wont get above a 5.9 regardless of raid-0 or interface speed.

i have 2x 500GB 32MB Cache SATAII drives in Raid 0 and it still gives me a 5.9, the same 5.9 I get with my 250GB 16MB Cache Drive.

Wrecking Crew, I don't know what the 'Windows Experience Index' is, it's a single 1TB drive and it's at 7200rpm. To me it's blazing fast coming from an 8 year old system with LOTS of space.

I will say this, when it's time to buy a new drive (in a couple years) I will go solid state.

Hi SkateZilla and Redhornet,
You can get to the Index through the Action Center flag that is in the System Tray - then go to 'View performance information'.

It does say that what is rated is the disc data transfer rate. I dug around a bit and found this from a guy at MSDN.

I work at an HDD company (I'm a data applications engineer) and asked around about disc data transfer rate - it does depend upon RPM, cache and the drive's electronics for *sustained* data transfer rates vs burst rates. A 5400 RPM drive with a small 4M cache won't *sustain* a transfer rate as fast as a 15,000 RPM drive with 32M cache. 3Gbs vs 6Gbs interface speed prolly won't make much difference because current HDD drive technology cannot keep above ~3Gbs sustained data rate.

I was curious if Redhornet's drive was 10K RPM and if that would show a higher index than my 7200's that show a 5.9 Index. Skatezilla - there was discussion that HDDs will not go above 5.9 but then some folks had reported slightly better values (?) - and it sounds like the WEI is being improved. But it has its share of critism.

WC

Redhornet - Glad to hear your problem was fixed fairly quickly.

I've got a 600GB Velociraptor 10k drive as my OS drive, only getting a 5.9 in WEI... And a 1TB Caviar Black dual CPU drive for games/storage.