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Donald L.

Donald L.

Joined on 08/23/05

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Product Reviews
Seller Reviews
product reviews
  • 3
Most Critical Review

Luck of the draw

Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: + Best price per GB (when purchased in Aug 2009) + Great sequential performance

Cons: * High failure rate (4/8 drive failures*) *failures are not catastrophic, but decommissioned based on the recommendation of the smartctl reported data. 4 of the 8 drives encountered 1000 to 4000 reallocated sectors per the smart ctl stats.

Overall Review: I ran 7 of these drives in a linux raid 6 array running 24/7. Average temperature readings for the drives were approximately 28 to 34 degrees C as reported by the drive. All drives were shipped with the CC1H firmware after some issues arose from various customers. Data turnover was around 5-10GB/week, with a read-heavy sequential IO workload. of mostly sequential access (e.g. large video files) Linux MD Stripes were set to 128KB chunks, so most disk IO would have been in 32 sector (x 4KB/sector) reads/writes. 1 of the 8 failed at the 3 year operating mark. 3 of the 8 failed at the 4 year 5 month mark. I still have 4 that are running within the healthy threshold. 0,1,31,1 reallocated sectors. 1 failures was replaced with an identical 9VS4SQV6, the other 2 were replaced with a ST3000DM001 & ST3000VX000 versions which have about 6 months/2hours of spin time on them w/out issue. One drive is pending replacement as of 2013-12-07. The 4 drives that failed had serials of: 9VS1L9MM 9VS1JLL9 9VS1K5GQ 9VS2AJ7H The 4 still in commission are: 9VS2B9ZS (4 years, 9 months, 1day - 0 reallocated sectors) 9VS2AJN0 (4 years, 3 months, 25days - 1 reallocated sector) 9VS4SQV6 (1 year, 9 months, 6days - 31 reallocated sectors) 9VS2A5TW (4 years, 3 months, 25days - 1 reallocated sector) It appears that the 9VS1xxxx batches of drives along with the early 9VS2Axxx all got within a smartctl recommended failure, while the other 9VS2A5xx and beyond are in excellent repair. Though this is a limited sample set, drive reliability appears to be based on the luck and manufacturing conditions of various batches as I've experienced drive failures in arrays typically of the same batch. Other readers, when buying lots of drives, try to purchase from diverse sources as to spread the risk of disk failure across multiple batches.

Not very effective

VANTEC HDC-701A-BL Aluminum Aluminum Hard Driver Cooler
VANTEC HDC-701A-BL Aluminum Aluminum Hard Driver Cooler

Pros: -Somewhat Cools

Cons: -Included screws didn't fit on HD (Too Small) -Low quality fan construction -High pitched fan whine. Typical of small fans -Not worth losing space for a heatsink

Overall Review: Running 8 drives in my box and using 2x 120mm fans to cool does a much better job than using this product individually on a drive.

Decent, but can't handle higher loads

COOLMAX CX-400B 400 W ATX v2.01 Power Supply
COOLMAX CX-400B 400 W ATX v2.01 Power Supply

Pros: Fairly quiet, and mine has worked well over the past 2 years.

Cons: After placing an addition 4x 750GB Drives, it couldn't keep up with the power demands. Worked well for about 3 months with the extra drives, but afterwards, my machine running linux became much more unstable. Uptime would be from 2 minutes to 2 hours.

seller reviews
  • 1

Slow Shipping from China

Item as described, but ordered on 5/29, requested refund on 6/3. Received reply on 6/4 that item had already shipped, and finally received shipment on 6/16. Seller offered a refund on return including shipping costs, but wasn't worth the effort. Newegg's merchants make me never want to purchase some Newegg again.

On-time
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Satisfactory