SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 ST500LM012 500GB 5400 RPM RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive

Pros: None

Cons: DOA out of the box

Pros: I originally bought a Toshiba laptop about 2.5 years ago, and this drive was in it. Since then, the MB on my laptop died and the laptop was no longer useable. About a year ago, I built a really good desktop pc and put this drive in as a secondary storage drive. All in all, the drive works great and never had a problem with it.

Cons: none that I can think of

Other Thoughts: I even used this drive in a kit as an external drive and it worked great like that too.

For a fairly inexpensive HD, this one is a good choice.

Pros: Bought this drive based on my experience with three other Spinpoints that I have purchased! Purchased a 320 gb from Newegg about 5 months ago, and have not had any problems. Purchased two other ones (1-250 gb $ 1-320 gb) from local retailer and are still working fine. The two purchased from local retailer were bought before Seagate ownership. As I stated, bought this drive based on passed experience, and because of $44.99 price. After registering drive on Seagate's website, I verified the warranty and it came back stating that it is covered by a 2 year warranty, not 1 year. Verified twice with the same result-warranty expires 21/June/2015. Also, the drive that I received was just manufactured in March of this year.

Cons: Really none-to early to tell. Skeptical of reliability based on negative reviews.

Other Thoughts: Will continue to purchase Samsung/Seagate drives.

Pros: Installed quickly and easily in to my Toshiba Laptop. Popped in the system restore and had it up in running in less than 90 minutes. The drive is quiet, and has normal speeds for 5400RPM drive. Works perfect for medical field applications.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: I've had nothing but great experiences with Samsung products and I expect this to be no different. Newegg.com ships so fast I got it the next day after ordering. One of the reasons I keep coming back!

Pros: I am well educated with computer technology from hard ware to software

Cons: need more room for my laptop

Pros: works
fair priced

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: bare drive

Pros: no problems

Cons: none

Pros: Replaced the failed factory seagate HD on my HP laptop Dv4 with this one. Works great. No issues or complaints. A+++

Cons: NONE

Pros: Worked for less than a week, no problems for that time period.

Cons: Stopped working after a week of using it as an external drive. Tried everything to fix it, and it was dead after that week. I assumed that since it worked, I was not going to be returning it, and threw away all my packaging and now I can't even return the drive. I now have a worthless $50 paper weight.

Other Thoughts: This is my second SAMSUNG spinpoint purchase, first was a 1tb that lasted less than a year before dying a week after this one. It is apparent to me that these are not reliable drives, and I have not wasted entirely too much money with Samsung, and will never be purchasing their products again.

Pros: Moderate streaming read performance, but on par for a 5400rpm. Handles random seeks fairly well, and both read and write speeds are pretty consistent from one end of the drive to the other. No vibration, noise, or heat troubles. While it's not a spectacular drive, it's definitely well worth the investment for the older laptop it went into (for a ~5x increase in space over what I had).

The manufacturer's warranty options on these drives, also, are excellent, including (depending on geographical limitations) free advance replacement, which is incredibly handy. (Given the repackaging from bulk that Newegg does to keep costs-to-us down, it's sometimes a pain to get ahold of single-drive packaging to RMA the occasional DOA drive, but an advance replacement inherently comes with packaging the manufacturer's guaranteed to find 'acceptable'.)

Cons: None, yet at least.

(Well, none with the drive that worked)

Other Thoughts: One of the two I picked up was effectively DOA, showed potential issues on a read test and started throwing uncorrectable errors after writes, but you'll have that now and again with drives... always test appropriately before trusting any new device with important data, and always keep backups.

Also, I haven't done any testing on peak or idle power consumption, as it's not a top concern with my use-case... I just had to swap something better in place of the old 80gb I was running before.