Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: good speeds (raid 1), it quiet (no seek noise), 5 year warranty if you need it. only 2 platters, less wear and tear and less heat.

Cons: none, priced accordingly to size and novelty (new) it was showing up at places at over $160! at first. Seagate does not include the clamshell these days? made in Thailand? Its a step up from China though.

Overall Review: once again OEM means bare drive!! know what to expect before you purchase. I now have 8 Seagate drives of various years with NO failures. I'll take reliability over speed any day.

Pros: I bought three of these drives to be mounted in a Synology network drive for a RAID 5 configuration (Look for that review under Synology). The drives arrived the next day (!) and were very well packaged in multiple layers of bubble wrap and styro-flakes. Brand-new drives, which came with a tiny jumper installed to configure the drive for 1.5 gps. The drives have now been running for more than a week under almost constant load. The RAID 5 configuration gives me about 2/3 of the capacity (960 GB) as usable space, the rest is security parity. After the initial integrity check (which ran all night), I started by making a manual test backup of one large drive with 90 GB and, once I had the Synology backup working, backed up the two workstations in the house, a total of about 300 GB from 4 local and one network drive. Very quiet operation, thanks to the Synology running very cool and I have noticeably faster performance on all network file operations, streaming music, photos or file cop

Cons: The posted failure rate still concerns me somewhat, many users complained about failures after a week to month. The tiny jumper that configures the drive for 1.5gbs is hard to get out and the drive should not come limited out of the box. They should provide the jumper for those users who need to configure it for less speed.

Overall Review: I spent a lot of time selecting this drive, because the perceived failure rate - looking at the negative reviews here at Newegg - is around 20-40% for all of these high performance drives. But then I realized that disappointed users are more likely to post a review than those who had success. If any drive manufacturer had a 30% failure rate, they'd be out of business in no time. However, the failure rate is still high from the absolute number of negative reviews, I suspect that it is around 5% for all drives sipped. That number needs to come down, but I suggest that everyone else takes the negative ratings for what they are: a manifest of real problems and cautions, but not a representative statistic.

Pros: The drive is quiet and performs very well. 5 year warranty.

Cons: It comes jumpered for 150Mb/SATA I, remove the jumper for 300Mb/SATAII specification.

Overall Review: I have not really noticed any performance gain with the 32MB cache.

Pros: No complaints while it worked. Average. No frills. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Cons: Died after a year or so of near-continuous use as my main drive. Thankfully, I was able to retrieve most of my important information so this wasn't a catastrophic loss. Another time and place and I might not have been so lucky. :P

Overall Review: I haven't really had a hard drive die on me in a long time. This decade, I've retired drives for larger ones long before they've had a chance to peter out. So this took me by surprise. Of course, I'm willing to consider that those of us who've suffered these failures are the exceptions. Out of over 1,500 reviews, 20% of them are 1-star, and 60% of them are 5-stars. I can't decide if that's good or bad. :P

Pros: 32 megs cache, less platters, quiet. PCB does not have any surface-mounted components exposed. My sustained speeds with this are 108MB/sec vs my 7200.10 AE firmware 320 gig which was 73 MB/sec. Windows Vista Experience for Hard Disk went from a 5.7 to a 5.9

Cons: Burst speed is slower, but from my understanding, sustained speed is more important. My burst speed for my 7200.10 was 141 MB/sec vs 86 MBsec for my 7200.11.

Overall Review: Sorry, too lazy to load hard drive tach..........official reviews are pretty much spot on the money.

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!

Pros: Seagate is the best, never EVER had a seagate drive fail, had plenty of WD's go down, and with the 7200.11 and the 5 year warranty, you know you're getting a rtock solid drive. Mine works better than any other 7200 rpm HDD I've ever had, read below why.

Cons: None

Overall Review: Just because I am a storage freak and I actually read proper testing, I want to reveal a small gem with this. The 32mb cache for an EDUCATED user IS worth it, however most people have no idea what it is for. The 32mb cache allows this drive to surpass many other drives with 'Sustained' Data Read/Write Rates. (Yes, this would actually meet and may outperform a 10k/raptor when doing long tests with 'sustained' data transfers) I am using a 7200.11 raid for the storage/transfers/programs that need benefit most from the cache. I have 15k hard drive raid for games and the applications which benefit from burst data reads/writes. For long haul data transfers/storage I grabbed a couple of these 7200.11's for BIG money savings and beautiful sustained data transfer performance. All in all you're getting a great drive, just know what you plan on doing with it, because there a MESS of misinformation and lack of information with hard drives.

Pros: It works perfect, I got this for torrent storage and its putting up with all I can give it right now. Maintaining D/L speeds as fast as my ISP provides and it hasn't overheated or overloaded a single time. I've peaked 80MB/s which is more than I expected from a SATA I drive. I got this when I returned a Hitachi drive of the same stats due to... awful failure. The only HDD's that have lasted me for years of abuse (abuse meaning around 100 gigabytes a day of data intake and outtake) are Seagates, so I decided to come back to the ones that treat me well. Not to mention a 5 yr. warranty that backs that up. Get these for anything... my servers getting 4 of the 750GB models next because I trust them to hold up and deal with anything you give them.

Cons: I didn't mind that the jumpers were preset to SATA I as thats the only mode Motherboard supports, but be wary of the jumpers if you need to switch them for SATA II, its a short one and it may be a pain to get out. So no cons for me!

Overall Review: If I hear one more person complain about being scammed of disk space I will find you and slap you. Newegg really needs to put up a test to prove High Understanding of tech products because you people have no clue. You want all 500GB? Fine, go to Linux where it will tell you that. You have not been scammed of a SINGLE BIT. It is how the OS you use determines drive geometries. Windows uses the old 8-bit system where if you have 500,000,000,000 bytes it will be determined through 1024 bytes per kilobyte, and 1024 kilobytes per megabyte, and 1024 megabytes per gigabyte. Grab a calculator and follow with me: 500,000,000,000 Bytes divided by 1024 is 488,281,250 Kilobytes, divided by 1024 is 476837 Megabytes, divided by 1024 is 465 Gigabytes. (I took decimals out, but it ends up the same) Your programs and files work on the same manner when added this way, so technically the only difference at the end of the day is what number is presented to you. Is it annoying? Sure, but thats Windows.