Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: These drives are fast, stable and are usually reliable. I bought two for a RAID-1 from two different lots to ensure they wouldn't die at the same time. They have run very well for 3 years and even survived a SATA controller failure. Excellent RMA service after one of them died. Excellent diagnostic tools.

Cons: So far, one of the two has not lived up to the 5-year warranty. After SMART failure, the bad drive took several attempts to boot up in a functional state, and SeaTools reported 70C temperature on a cold boot.

Other Thoughts: If you can afford it, always go with a RAID if your data is important. Buy one drive from two different places, or order them a month apart, to ensure you get two drives that were made on different dates, or different lots at least. This greatly reduces the chance that the drives will die at the same time.

One of mine started acting up after 3 1/2 years and the RAID kicked it out. I requested an advanced RMA, swapped in the refurb drive they sent me, formatted the bad drive and mailed it back with the included shipping label. Things are working well once again.

Pros: At the time they were quick, large, cheap, enterprise drives

Cons: poor reliability

Other Thoughts: The MTBF is 1.2M hours according to manufacturer but out of the 25 drives we have, 8 have been RMA'd shy of the 3 year mark with 24/7 use. Average mean time we are experiencing in an enterprise environment is 22,220 hours.

2 of the replacement drives through RMA process were DOA!

Hopefully quality issues have been resolved... very poor drives. On the plus-side, the SMART errors grew consistently days up to ultimate failure so we were prepared to replace them with spares.

Pros: High capacity, fast.

Cons: We bought 36 of these drives 2 years ago and as of yesterday the number of failures is 7. Luckily I use these drives in a RAID configuration with regular backups and have not lost any data. I do not trust these drives enough to let a server run on a single hard drive so I shut it down until a replacement arrives.

Other Thoughts: Seagate is phasing out the Barracuda ES.2 drives and are being replaced by the Seagate Constellation es. Maybe these drives are better?

Pros: Low cost.

Cons: We have deployed nearly a hundred of these at various clients for use in RAID arrays. The failure rate has been atrocious. At one client, so far 6 of 32 drives have failed over 1 year of use. Our other clients have similar failure rates, approximately 20%. This is unacceptable, and Seagate support has been of no help. They will only replace the drives as they fail and the client is responsible for shipping charges to Seagate.

In addition to failing drives, even working drives will randomly stop responding, causing cascading issues with the RAID arrays.

Other Thoughts: Never buying or recommending Seagate drives again. Before anyone suggests these: the power is backed by 1+ runtime hours of UPS, and in climate controlled server rooms, these were all shipped with the latest firmware from Seagate, SN06, and were purchased several months apart, making a bad batch seem unlikely. They are listed as compatible for the RAID equipment we are using.

Pros: Is 7200 RPM which is average and its pretty fast. 32 MB of cache is really good for a drive. Supports SATA II which is good for the price. Performs very well and has never failed. I love Seagate drives. They have great five year warranties and last a long time.

Cons: It doesn't have 64 MB of cache and is only 7200 RPM but because it is only a "good" drive and not an "amazing" drive you can't expect that. Doesn't come with enough screws for my case.

Other Thoughts: I have had this drive for a year and I have never had a problem. Now I have an SSD which is my boot drive but I still use this drive as my storage drive because the SSD is only 60 GB. The drive doesn't bottleneck my system at all and is good because my mobo doesn't do SATA III. I still back up all my data on a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB because I have had problems with drives before but I don't anticipate having any with this one for a while.
My Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 620
Mobo: Asus M4A78T-E
Case: Xion Gaming Series ArmorX
Graphics: Diamond ATI Radeon HD 5750
RAM: OCZ Gold DDR3 4GB 1070MHZ
PSU: Antec Earthwatts 650
Optical Drive: Super Writemaster
HDD (Storage): This Drive
SSD (Boot Drive): OCZ Vertex 2 60GB

Pros: 5 year warranty, quiet. Supposed to be a "Enterprise" class product, 24x7 data center.

Cons: Purchased 3 in May 2010, Mid Nov 2010 all three fail Seatools test.
Rma to Seagate asap.
Seagate appears to be the new General Motors of the disk drive industry, meaning manufacturing and quality control problems. Seagate used to be the "Cadillac" of the industry, the one product to buy for trouble free service, I guess those days are gone, nothing but trouble with this product.

Other Thoughts: Would I buy again, probably not

Pros: Fast.

Cons: It started clicking about one month after it was installed as C drive. The clicking became worse, then windows started crashing, and dumping memory. Windows 7 became corrupt and not run. If I install it as a slave, it still clicks, but I did save my files. Would I buy it again? NO WAY!

Other Thoughts: There was no firmware update on this drive form Seagate.

Pros: Works great for the first year. Large storage. Decent speed.

Cons: I bought 3 of these in 2008 and in 2009. Had it for almost 2 years. First one died a year and half. 2nd one died little bit after. Since I didn't have backup of the 2 drives. I voided warrenty by opening it and trying to retrieve data myself. Bad idea. FAILED. Third one died a couple months after that. Now, I'm just waiting when the next one will die. All had same symtom. It would not read and not allow bootup. When booting up, it freezes. tried it on different pc, internal and external devices. These are BAD storage hard drives. The previous gen 750GB were so much better, ran faster and more reliable. I had 4 of them runing almost 24/7 unlike the 1TB and they still working after over 3 years. Bought those 750 back in 2007 when it first came out. Screw seagate's 1TB. They aren't worth the money. Plus I notice they are sort of loud and make clicking noises. I love Seagate, but their new drives are just horrible. Don't buy this one.

Other Thoughts: Haven't call up seagate for replacement on the 3rd drive, because I keep reading bad reviews about their customer support. I don't think it would be worth it to call them knowing how many people tried.

Pros: Worked right out of the box. Haven't had any problems yet...

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: Would recommend to anyone looking for a good hard drive.

Pros: High capacity.

Cons: I bought two of these in July 2008 and they both failed within two months of each other. They came with a five-year warranty, so Seagate will replace them, but the hassle factor is a bummer.

Other Thoughts: I've bought almost exclusively Seagate drives for the last 15 years, and these are the first that I can remember ever having failed within their warranty period. Bad design? Bad manufacturing? Bad quality control? You decide.