Pros: This drive has performed flawlessly during the first year (virtual 24/7 operational environment). The drive is quiet (cannot hear it above the low-noise Noctua system fans I have running in the background) as compared to my 1TB HDD which I can definitely hear when it kicks in to write data. This HDD provides a balance between potentially noisy 10,000 RPM HDD and expensive SSD to fill the performance demand in a gaming system or similar work environment. I recommend this HDD for a high use operating environment (servers, operating systems, page/swap files, etc).

Cons: While having a Form Factor of 2.5", this HDD will not fit in most Notebook HDD bays due to the non-standard 14.8mm thickness. Do not recommend for laptop users unless you can confirm if it will fit in your HDD bay. There are better options for the price now in terms of storage capacity and most can take advantage of SATA 6Gb/s interface now.

Overall Review: Bought this to serve primarily as a high utilization HDD in my desktop system. I have installed my most-used applications as well as the pagefile of my operating system on it. I have a 32GB SLC SSD as my primary operating system drive and a 1TB HDD as my primary storage drive. This 160GB Seagate HDD takes the brunt of the work and reduces the amount of writes to my SSD especially when playing online video games.