Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST3500620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: If drive has newest firmware, it works well and no problems.
Fast and quiet.

Cons: Seagate actually made a mistake and released the firmware update that broke these drives last year. Later firmware fix took care of all problems.

Overall Review: I previously wrote a bad review because I have had several of these fail. I bought 4 of these drives last year, 3 of them failed. The failures all had the Jan 2009 firmware that Seagate released to fix a previous problem. Seems there was a problem with this firmware and eventually bios will quit reporting the drive, as happened in my case. The refurb drives with the Jan 2009 firmware only had a 90 day warranty. Seagate rushed a fix for the buggy firmware, but in my case it was too late. My fourth drive from Oct 2009 has the newest firmware and is still going strong after 11 months with no errors and no problems. I decided to order another one of these drives. It came about two weeks ago in a box that UPS had obviously played box soccer with it. I was going to call UPS and refuse the package, but decided to check it. Unbelievable, the drive worked with no problems and passed all diagnostics after being abused, dropped and kicked by UPS.

Pros: price looked good

Cons: didn't work. lots of clicking and intermittent recognition by pc. Tried copying to it for backup under windows to no avail. Tried installing Ubuntu and would not be recognized by the software long enough to go through the installation process.

Overall Review: should have tried it out before refund policy expired. Recertified in this case just meant repackaged. :-(