Someone else with a little more experience in the topic can reply/correct me, but I think it will appear to work fine for a while, but as you load the HDD with more stuff, it will eventually drastically degrade the performance. I think I remember reading with the WD EARS drives there was software to align it, and then maybe it would be fine after that...? I dunno, I returned my EARS drive after I read about them not working well, even before I opened the static bag. Hopefully this helped, but someone else can chime in with more technical reasons.