Pros: Works

Cons: Somewhat expensive for a refurbished drive (I paid the same amount for my original, brand new, ST31000340NS drives) Mine came with very old firmware (RS03) The supplied firmware did not function well with my NAS (ReadyNAS NV+)

Overall Review: This is my second review on this product as I couldn't find a way to edit the first one. While these drives initially showed a large and growing number of reallocated sectors, unrecoverable errors, etc. this was not the drive's fault, rather, it was due to a lack of compatibility between the supplied firmware and my NAS. I have since upgraded these drives to the latest firmware (SN06), run them through all the tests in SeaTools, and have had no issues since. The firmware upgrade process was not straight forward due to the age of the original firmware. Go to the seagate support forum, search for ST31000340NS, and select the thread titled "Barracuda ES.2 (ST31000340NS) will not accept firmware update". One of the last posts contains instructions for using a command line tool to update the firmware. I used a modified version of that command to update my firmware. (the .exe and .lod file names were slightly different on the firmware CD I had)

Pros: They are refurbished drives

Cons: After a week or two both of the refurbished drives I purchased showed a large (150+) and growing reallocated sector count along with a number (5-303) offline uncorrectable sectors. In other words, the drives may spin when you get them, but probably not for long.

Pros: Looks like it would work well, good surface area, fan, etc.

Cons: In my case, with an 1155 based motherboard (DQ77MK) and CPU (i7-3770), the retention screws did not reach from the back of the MB through the bracket attached to the CPU cooler. It was impossible to screw on the nuts that were supposed to retain the CPU cooler bracket. I possibly could have made this work if I bent the bracket. In the end I used the stock cooler that came with the CPU. That was much easier to install, and provides adequate cooling while I search for a better cooler that might actually work.