Customer Reviews

Seagate Barracuda 1 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Desktop Hard Drive ST310005N1A1AS-RK-Retail Kit

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The first thing to be mentioned, is that no one can rightfully complain about not having 1TB of storage, every drive, for the longest time is rated raw. When I formatted mine to NTFS it was 931.5GB, about 20GB more than I even expected.

The second thing to understand, is every drive model, from every manufacturer, has a pretty standard, and somewhat high, DOA (here I am considering DOA as literally dead on arrival, and 1 week and under) rate. If you receive a DOA, rate the replacement, or the service you received. If you get two DOA's, or get a replacement that is DOA; complain freely.

I have my drive (I have the exact drive, except I purchased it OEM) inside a Nexstar 3 enclosure (capable of recognizing all 1TB) via esata (you can use USB 2.0 with this enclosure as well). The esata run into my Asus G2S-B2 via a Rosewill Expresscard32 2-port esata expansion. In short, the performance I received, will reflect SATAII internal performance Identically.

The first thing to do, if your sata controller can handle auto-negotiation, is to remove the tiny gray jumper entirely, this will increase your burst performance.

Seq. Write - 70 MB/s Seq. Read - 105 MB/s Buffered Write - 59 MB/s Buffered Read - 62 MB/s Random Reading - 54 MB/s This drive is faster than the kin Seagate inside my laptop as the main disk. For those of you who can't use it internally or through esata, you will not see this kind of performance, the theoretical throughput of USB 2.0 is almost half the seq. read.

These tests are run through PC Wizard 2008, important, with the jumper installed. I didn't wish to assume people know what it is and know if their sata controller can use it removed. The performance is slightly better, but nothing substantial, without the jumper (it effectively dubs the drive down to sata 1).

I've basically torture tested this drive since I received it almost a month ago, it is perfect. Generally, I've found, drives fail sooner than later; this drive will most likely serve me for quite some time.

I recommend this drive over any other, if the performance is not higher (Hitachi's are snoozfest), then the fail rate is much much lower (Samsung's new 1TB is notoriously bad, unacceptably high fail rate). etc.

Be careful with this drive, Seagate has a known problem with many of it's recent Baracuda High Capacity Hard Drives, where after 3-6 months, the drive simply fails to boot.

If you purchase this drive, you must go to the [..] site and use the drive detect software they offer there to see what version of firmware is on your drive. If there is an updated version of firmware then you need to flash update your drive.

If you are uncomfortable doing this, then i would suggest buying another vendor's drive.

The master seagate forum thread discussing these problems is here: [..] (well over a thousand messages).

You can also do a search for "ST3100034AS problems" on google.

This drive has been nothing short of amazing throughout the six months that I've owned and used it. It's very quiet, ultra-fast and extremely reliable. I've had two Western Digital HDD's and one Hitachi that failed very early. I'd like to get my jab in by saying that both of their customer support numbers and sites were worthless. I've never had to use Seagate's.

I currently have this HDD mounted in my Klegg MediaShare (I love this thing!) unit. I've backed up approximately 360 of my DVD's (ISO format) to it using DVD Fab Platinum and DVD Shrink 3.2 and can now downsize my storage space for the originals to four 100-disc spindles instead of three media cabinets. I highly recommend both products as they are both high quality. Seagate is the only brand that I've had truly had success with over the years and I consider myself a loyal customer because of their reliability and performance.

Just a little over 3 weeks old and it died. Seagate's poor overseas tech support, of no help, they offer to send a `refurbished' drive (a used one) to replace what I purchased NEW. Called Seagate Corporate, no help, selecting numbers to more automated script recorded voices. No option to get to a real person or a operator. Good bye Seagate, poor service, poor drive. Save your money. Run from this company.

Installing this hard drive was simple and quick. Seagate has done a good job at making the transfer of information from the old hard drive to the new one. It took me about 1/2 hour for the whole process.

Sadly I must write a one star review on this product. I've been a Seagate Customer for years, but not happy with this drive.

Initially I purchsed it for installation in my DVR - 24/7 usage. At first it seemed okay, but after a month or so, I noticed some slow downs & hiccups on the DVR. Finally in Mid November my DVR was behaving like it was possessed; culminating in me waking up one morning to the DVR rebooting endlessly trying to repair itself, finally ending in what's known as the green screen of death.

A surface scan & SMART error code checking; the drive was failing in a massive way, more than 30% of the surface was testing as failed. I can probably format it and get more life out of it; but I have no faith in it. I purchased Seagate ST31000340AS 1TB Barracuda Sata 7200 Rpm 32MB Cache 8.5MS Hard Drive instead. I also noticed that my DVR is performing faster than it ever did with this drive; so something could have been wrong from the outset.

Since I'm not within the 30 day return period and not messing with the manufacturer return or RMA process hassle, I've eaten the cost of this drive.

It may have been the 24/7 environment, but you'd think with the higher priced version of this drive it would perform well -- it didn't.

I purchased this Seagate 1TB harddrive from Amazon, it arrived within a few days. It was snuggled in a larger amazon box with a few air-pillows keeping it secure.

I was a little disappointed the drive doesn't read as a full TB, but I guess thats okay.

The drive was easy to install, open the computer case, discharge any static electricity from your fingers then install the new drive with a screw driver. Plug the sata cable into your harddrive and the other end to the correct sata port on your motherboard.

Plug in the power cable to the harddrive then turn on your computer.

Use the seagate disc to install the tools you need to set up the harddrive. Select if you want it as a boot drive or just a secondary drive, then set the partition sizes. Thats about it.

I used the tools to clone my original boot drive then in bios set the drive to boot up and everything went smoothly with no problems...

I highly recommend this drive, it has plenty of space for pictures and downloaded video.

I have installed my hard drive and I am very happy I will be back for more soon plus it came with the migrating and back up software That saved me $40
I could not find a better price anywhere
This gets my vote!

I purchased 15 of these drives in both the OEM and boxed retail version when they first came out and they were not cheap at that time. All 15 failed within the first year due to the now well-known firmware problem that Seagate had released in the drives. It seems that after they were power cycled about 100 times they just died.

Seagate has a good warranty program and they would exchange them for free. That still doesn't pay for all of your time, labor, troubleshooting, lost data, and shipping cost to return them to have them replaced. Sadly when you would return a drive that may be only a few months old they would return a refurbished drive with new firmware. You have no idea how many hours this drive was used or how much life is left in it. Out of 15 returned drives 8 have failed a second time and some even a third from bad sectors on the disk surface. More time, labor, troubleshooting, and costs down the drain again.

I even got returned units that were refurbished and they failed right out of the box. The last returns I sent back for the third time I told them I did not want any more refurbished drives sent to me and they agreed.

Seagate has been supportive to me but what a lot of work. For a computer GEEK I cannot think of a worse problem than continuous failures and loss of data from a top reputation company like Seagate. They have forced me to become an expert at testing drives before they are installed and before I return them. The testing software "SeaTools" and I have become old friends.

I still buy Seagate drives and the newer models work fine. I still test them all before installation.

This drive comes with a 5 year warranty which gives some indication about Seagate's expectation about its quality and servicability given that many drives come only with a 3 year warranty. Since it was the retail kit it came packed in the manufacturer's material and arrived via UPS looking as if I purchased it at a local store. I used it to upgrade my windows XP system to Windows 7 by doing a clean install. There were no issues with this drive during this install or afterward. It scores well on the Windows experience measurement (5.9) and obviously has lots of storage room. It doesn't appear to make much noise when seeking data but there is some sound during high disk activity, something that the original disk did also. So far it's been a great trouble free drive.