Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST3000NM0033 3TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Large Cache. Good Spindle Speed. Long Warranty.

Cons: Of two ordered and placed into service as part of an array in a server, one has failed already. Any drive can fail, but expected better from higher priced enterprise class drive. -1 egg for early failure. -1 egg for having to pay shipping to replace a defective product (see other thoughts).

Overall Review: Ordered Enterprise class drives as the OS/Program drives in a server mostly due to their speed and longer warranty. Higher Priced Enterprise Drive + Early Failure + General pain in the patoot to RMA the drive + Having to pay shipping to replace defective product = Disgruntled Customer. My customer is understanding about failing drives, but is on pins and needles until the replacement drive arrives and is rebuilt into the array. I find it very irritating that I have to pay the shipping (almost 10% of the price of the product) to return a defective product for exchange. If I had just changed my mind that would be one thing, but having to pay to return a bricked drive is extremely galling.

Pros: If you are concerned to identify whether these ES.3 drives are SATA or SAS, it is simple. If the model number ends with 33 it is SATA without hardware encryption or higher areal density. Best price point that is, given this class of drive with 128 MB Cache, 7200 RPM spin, 5-year warrantee. For SAS it is 23.

Cons: price today is about twice the price of Seagate 2 year warrantee drives. I guess it depends on the cost to you of replacing cheap drives.

Pros: They seem to be working fine. The ones I received have a Dell part number. The manufactured date is Dec-2013. I ran Crystal Disk Info and it shows 0hrs used and only 1start. They are new/unused. The firmware shows GA06. Seagate does not list any firmware updates for the serials numbers I received. Manufactured in Thailand.

Cons: They should be listed as NOS (New Old Stock). When were those Thailand floods?

Overall Review: Added all four drvs to a RAID6 array, they seem to be working fine.

Pros: it's quick - not SSD quick but still quick for a normal hard drive. avg random read was 144MB/s. most file transfers are between 100MB/s and 130MB/s buffered reads were between 350MB/s and 515MB/s it is noticeably quicker than the old WD hds I have. This is in a desktop that almost never shuts down. No sleep mode or suspend, either. In the many months since I bought the drive there haven't been any problems with it.

Cons: wish the price was a little lower.

Overall Review: Hope it lasts as long as the 2 WD drives also installed - 7yrs on one and 5yrs on the other.

Pros: Use Win 8.1 Disk Management to convert to GPT disc if you want to use all the drive's available space for a single partition! Writes seem fast, around 100MB/s on a SATA II controller. So far, so good but then ALL of them usually work great right out of the box so let's give this one some spin time and see how it acts..

Cons: Drive was enclosed in a plastic caddy, which punctured all the air bags in the shipping box from it's sharp corners, NEWEGG could have packed it better for shipping than bouncing around in a box with a bunch of empty plastic bags..

Pros: Faster than the WD Black Quieter than the WD Black 128 MB Cache Better sustained transfer rates than the WD Black

Cons: A bit on the pricey side. I can no longer say WD makes the best HDD's

Overall Review: I have two of these and two of the WD blacks (all 2TB). I have run them side by side in three different systems and this drive always wins in every way. Transferring the same files to and from each drive (to and from an SSD), this drive is consistently faster in both directions. I have been a WD user for DECADES, it is kinda hard to say I think this is a superior drive. Going on a few months now and none of my four drives have failed, so at least there is that.

Pros: These units are from Seagate's Enterprise class drives. I specifically use these in servers and business usage. Have quite a few of them now (several dozen) in multiple servers under hardware RAID controllers. Not a single failure or SMART error so far (so think some of the DOA comments are probably a bunch of malarkey). Performance is excellent for this type of drive and have been running them for several months without incident.

Cons: Would be nicer if they were a lower price. But then again, glad to pay a little extra for a higher rated (MTBF) drive with the longer warranty.

Pros: Bought about 15 of these so far this year, all have been reliable No complaints really.

Cons: Nothing yet