Pros: Giving it a rating of 4 now because the firmware upgrade went flawlessly. BTW, my experience with newegg was awesome, as always.

Cons: Well, I guess that I had to do the upgrade, and that Seagate customer service was not very knowledgeable.

Overall Review: You can tell right away if you got one of the "bad firmware" drives by looking at the label. While the label on the drive states the correct model number, it will also state the firmware version. Mine says "SD04", which is the "bad" one. The new updated firmware is version "AD14". Check your drive, and good luck!

Pros: it works.

Cons: The drive I received shows up on device manager as ST3500820AS with a firmware version SD04 instead of ST3500320AS. Of course that means that I only have 8MB of Cache available. This mistake (however it happened) is simply unacceptable to me.

Overall Review: Seagate customer support was somewhat incompetent, too. Contacted them via chat to get the new firmware. The guys dumps the instruction into the chat window. These say a floppy drive is needed for the firmware flash. Of course I don't have one (who does nowadays?). He tells me that in this case, I can't install the new firmware, and that my only option is a return. Luckily, he had already also given me the download address and the approval code to get the new A14 firmware. The download package contains an ISO image for a bootable CD, so I can actually do it and I hope the upgrade will go smooth. The guy had no clue. Again, simply unacceptable. Watch out what you get!