Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: Please read the Cons.

Cons: I bought this drive just over 2 years ago and it died on me 7 months ago. Reason I am writing now is because my son had another one of these drives which was bought 3 years back with its attraction of 24x7 reliability.

A total disappointment as one of the drives we bought over 5 years ago is still up and running!

Other Thoughts: I would have been more forgiving if only 1 drive had died but both the drives going around 6 months gap from one another just implies there are not 24x7 drives by Seagate.

Pros: - Fast (For an HDD) when its not broken.

Cons: - Broke after only 5months

Other Thoughts: Do yourself a favor and get an SSD or a Western Digital. The customer service is okay but a 5month old hard drive should not be breaking in the first place. On top of that, they sent me back a refurbished hard drive while Western Digital will replace your hard drive with a new one.

Pros: Work with most RAID controllers. I've been using them with an Areca for 2 yrs with no major problems.

Cons: I had to do a firmware update which required making a backup (for safety) and re-connecting to a "legacy" SATA port. This was a pain since I had to fiddle with the innards of the box.

Other Thoughts: Seagate had a bad firmware run which effected consumer drives to a greater degree than enterprise drives, but still it had to be done. There's no 'good' way to do these unless you have an OEM drive and an OEM controller and have paid a lot for an OEM machine from a 2, 3, or 4 letter-named vendor.

Pros: Excellent stability and reliability. I have both ES.2 and ES series drives, over 150 installed so far. All used in raid 0. No failures. I only run Debian and VBOX so that Windows users can also use my systems. Usually five drives per array. HDPARM measures 540 Megabytes per second base transfer rates.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: I keep reading negative reviews about these drives yet I have experienced zero failure rates and excellent performance. Since I build all the machines we deploy and do not by commercial units I can make sure that I have excellent cooling in the units, usually a minimum of four 140mm fans running at 60CUF/MIN. I wonder if these other users are simply not allowing for enough cooling air on these drives. Also I have never had to install firmware to get these to work properly. I would check to see if your motherboards are healthy. We mainly use Tyan and MSI boards and have not had any problems.

Pros: Fast, quiet drive. Easy installation.

Cons: Died suddenly, after about two years of use. Not sure what failed, but Vista (yes, I know) will not load, and keeps giving me an I/O error. We'll see how they handle the 5 year limited warranty that this drive is supposed to have.

Other Thoughts: I usually buy WD drives, but thought I would give this a shot instead. I gave three eggs because until the sudden demise, I really had no complaints, and I'm not sure if this failure is linked to my recent video card failure or not. The video card died a week earlier, and the chip burned up, the hard drive survived for 3-4 days after I got the replacement.

And as always, super fast service from Newegg.

Pros: I bought 4 of these a couple of years ago. Enterprise grade with a 5-year warrenty should be great quality. Fast and quiet with a large cache.

Cons: They don't run for very long. I have 3 drives in a RAID 5 with a hot spare. One failed after about a year. Another one failed just now after 2 years and the hot spare was the refurb that replaced the first failure and it failed immediately when called into service.

Other Thoughts: So, 2 of the original 4 failed within 2 years and the refurb failed too. 3 failures out of 4 drives is too many. Yea, they are under warrenty, but $20 shipping for each returned drive.

Pros: Purchased 11 of these last year and got them Five dollars cheaper than they cost now. New Egg has great shipping & the best customer service.

Cons: Seagate has lost their touch. Quality control has to be the worst in the industry. Almost all Seagate drives require a firmware update, why? You will replace this drive within the 1st 2 years.

Other Thoughts: I used to be a huge Seagate fan, in fact I would not buy anything else for myself or my customers. If you woul dhave told me 4 years ago I would be buying nothing than WD Hard Drives I would have laughed and said you were mad! Don't waste your time, buy a Good WD drive and you will not be unhappy. I know all drives are mechanical and are prone to breaking down but come on, 11 out of 11 in a years time? That is horrible. Sorry I had to write a bad review, but it is what it is. BTW, i just had one die tonight, I guess if I want it replaced I have to pay another $14 for shipping to Seagate for a RMA repair and wait 2-3 weeks to get a refurbished one back.

Pros: I have used these drives in at least 12 machines I have installed in the last six months. All of them have three of these drives running in raid 0. They have been rock solid. Fast quit and extremely reliable. Thats 36 drives in use without a single failure.

Cons: None now that the price has come down.

Other Thoughts: For those of you running raid 5 and raid 6 or even mirroring. Nothing takes the place of actual backups to a near line drive, they are cheap. If you do an analysis on the various raid scenarios you will find that raid 0 puts the least stress on the drives. I have run strenuous tests on drives checking total run time, peak temperatures, and delta temp. All the tests showed that raid 0 put the least stress on the drives.

Pros: Ran quickly, quiet....fast shipping

Cons: Died after 1 year almost exactly!

Pros: * Asus P6X58D had no problems creating a RAID1 mirror with two of these right away.
* Windows 7 64-bit installed on the drives without a problem
* 5.9 windows performance rating

Cons: * 5.9 windows performance rating -- I think that's good but it's the lowest on my PC so I figured I'd add it. :)