Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 ST3300657SS 300GB 15000 RPM 16MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Unkike EJ on page one of the reviews you dont use these drives for STORAGE they are Windows or OS drives. that is why you buy a 3 TB for under $200.00 or a 4 TB for under $300.00.....

I have a 15.7k 300 GB Windows and the 3930k CPU Clocked to 4.8 Ghz, 64 GB Memory and the nVidia GeForce 680 GTX and Windows performance index although I dont think much of it reports a 7.9 all the way down. and 99% of the bottlenecks occur at either memory, CPU Cache or Drive Read / Write for the OS.

Cons: Expensive but worth it

Other Thoughts: you will find me in the OC and ROG forums as well

Pros: I have owned many of these Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Drives. They are the only Manufacture that makes it tight and right with the highest of quality and performance, I am running this drive on an LSi 9207 4e / 4i Host Controller, using this drive for my Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit system drive. My average boot time after the LSi Controller and Drive loads is 8 Seconds sometimes shorter rarely longer. I have it mounted in its own 3 drive Bay as a single drive mounted in the center bay at the rear of the case. This is to maximize cooling space around the drive, the Drive cage also provides a mount for a 3 inch Fan, I chose the 12v 4000 RPM Fan to extract the air out of the case, by the way is a Lian-Li 343B Cube where the main board mounts in the center of the case with all of the storage racks are on the Right Side and all of the electronics are on the left side which separates the heat and is much more efficient in heat evacuation. My Storage drives are all Seagate constellation 7200 RPM Drives & Support the 6.0 Gps SATA specification w/ a 64 MB Buffer These drives are mounted in a Hot Swap Cage and occupy 3 5.25 external Drive Bays also with a 90mm High volume mid speed fan. The LSi Controller supports one male cable end which handles the power and data through one 4 leg cable w/ 4 one piece connectors that I can add 3 more drives, which I would never do a/o who needs that kind of performance for Storage drives. The Controller setup is fairly easy if you are experienced in the old school 'Small Computer System Interface" architecture otherwise know as "SCSI" it operates in exactly the same way. You must load the driver using the F6 option during the Windows 7 install which is now the "Load Driver" option and will support Thumb Drives as well as Optical Drives. Once that is done you will see your drive appear in the "Installable Drives Box" I do recommend disconnecting all other storage drives you have connected this is for 2 reasons.
1. You wont run the risk of installing the Operating System on the
Wrong Drive
2. It will Align your drive letters in the proper order ie:
C:\ Windows System
D:\ Optical drive
Then after the install when you plug in your storage drive(s) they will appear as E:\ and up.

Cons: Ya gotta bust out your wallet for this type of configuration but very worth it if your building a high end system I gaurantee you wil not be bottle necking in the drive department.

My performance rating is a straight 7.9 all the way down

Other Thoughts: If you want a top of the line system buy this hardware

Pros: Good, dependable drive. We use these in all of our our clients servers (300 and 600 gig models) and they all perform well. You pay more as server quality parts are pricey, but you get what you pay for and you need to pay for some reliability.

Cons: No real CONS to speak of.

Other Thoughts: The drives will wear out and fail, it's a given if left in use for long enough, nature of the beast, be prepared to update/upgrade your gear along the way. We try to replace them by the 5 year mark, but have many in service past that age, only one I can think of has failed earlier than 3 years, but that's out of well over 100 that we have used in our builds.

Pros: The drive is very robust, I read and write about 100 GB of data per day. Very good speeds, it has SSD like performance for small files and speeds of 160 GB/s for large transfers. Good price to GB ratio when compared to SSD drives.

About 20 people were I work have this HHD in their computer and I have not heard on any failures.

Cons: Too small for my work load. I can only have 1 to 2 projects on my workstation at a time. If I had a say in my own workstation I would do raid 5 with 2TB drives which would give me better performance and a lot more room.

Power usage: 8.75 (idle) to 12.92 Watts (average operating)

Other Thoughts: Some Benchmark info from my drive:
4KB Random Read: 34,747 IOPS
4KB Random Write: 33896 IOPS
Max Read: 163 MB/s
Max Write: 166 MB/s

Pros: Bulletproof reliability, fastest line of non-SSD disks on the planet.

Cons: Higher cost per GB than SATA, but you get what you pay for.

Other Thoughts: My dayjob is server admin at the datacenter level. All of our rackmount servers run 4 Seagate Cheetah 15k rpm SAS disks per machine, and the failure rate is near zero even on servers where disk I/O is very heavy all day long. Our experience is you will retire the server due to obsolescence before these disks fail.

Pros: Unable to determine because hard drive was shipped defective. This review is actually for newegg customer service.

Cons: newegg customer service is a big cons. If newegg send you a bad product and you ask for an rma and then tells you when you sent the product back for rma that they don't sold that particular product, then who's fault is it????? How would you feel if you just spend $300 for a brick hard drive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Other Thoughts: newegg shipped this drive to me defective. asked for rma, sent drive back, just to learn that they will not replace the drive because they didn't sold the drive. If that is the case where do I stand right now? They sold me a brick and I am on my own! Way to treat your customer newegg who happens to spend a lot of money buying parts from you. Obviously somebody may have switched that drive in your end, because this is the first time I am building a SAS system.