Customer Reviews

Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

I bought 4 of these for a RAID5 setup in September. So far I've had two of them fail. One was a hard failure in which the controller stopped working completely, and the other is showing a lots of seek errors in the SMART data and tells me its going to fail soon. They both started clicking the heads (a symptom of a reset because of an error) just a few days after I got them.

Seagate replaced the total failure within a couple of days after I reported it, and now I have to ship them back the failed drive. I bought a new unit I'm expecting tomorrow as a spare replacement, and I will be reporting and shipping back the drive with all the seek errors soon.

The drives have otherwise been great, but 50% isn't such a good reliability statistic, and that's my primary measure for a drive.

On the other hand, I did buy two other drives from the same family, two ST3500320AS drives. They have been working away flawlessly in my workstation in a RAID1 setup since I got them.

This is an OEM drive as several reviewers have noted, but this should be expected of any drives sold by Amazon unless the retail box is shown in the product description. This should not be a problem for most people since most motherboards come with extra SATA cables and most power supplies now have SATA these days, but if you need these items along with mounting screws opt for only drives sold in retail packaging. Now, about the drive. The drive is very quiet and works well once you get a good one. I had to reurn as many as I kept to get good drives. I think the reason is due to the poor packaging that others have noted. Drives that arrived in good working order were in sealed anti-static packaging with the black plastic end caps supporting the drives. The ones that were problematic were in anti-static bags but arrived only wrapped in one layer of bubble wrap or in syrofoam. One arrived in a plastic snap-around holder which was not even sealed. This was totally unacceptable. I have to think Amazon would find their hard drive return rate much less if they mandated their sources use acceptable shipping practices. The drive really is a 5-star device particularly with its 5-year warranty, but the shipping practices rate 1-star. That's why my overall rating is 3-stars. Two items of note: 1) Remember to remove the jumper on the drive to make it operate in SATA-II mode (300 mb/s vs. 150 mb/s), and 2) at Seagate.com you can download their SeaTools diagnostice program to checkout your hard drive but be forwarned. With version 1.1.0.21 of Seatools the Short and Long diagnostic self tests failed against my drives. I worked on this a long time thinking it was a motherboard or cable issue since the drive worked fine otherwise. I finially realized that the version of SeaTools on my othe PC was v1.1.0.19 and it ran without any problems!!! I called Seagate and got mixed answers. Initially one tech said "Drive is bad. Send it back for replacement". After figuring out that 1.1.0.19 works just fine, I called back. New tech said, "yes, we don't recommend running the Windows version since there can be interaction with the OS". I understand his comment but given that v1.1.0.19 works just fine, I'm inclined to believe Seagate needs to work on their Windows version of SeaTools. He recommended only booting the PC up in DOS and using the DOS version for better test reliability. Anyway, wanted to pass this along before anyone else goes down the SeaTools yellow brick road.

This is a OEM drive so that it all you get no screws or SATA cable so have them on hand. Also Register your drive Before you install you need the serial # off the drive to do so for your 5 year warranty. Good Value for the price per GB. Great Drive for back-ups

It's the classic price vs performance debate. How much do you value your data and at what cost should you protect it? Personally I think Seagate has an edge on the competition, it's prices are decent, whilst most importantly, the performance and build of the drives are stellar. It runs quiet, I was forced to strain to listen to hear it running. It actually ran all night backing up an entire archive and was only moderately warm. The 5 year warranty put's your mind at rest too should the unspeakable happen.

I bought two of these in December. Within two weeks of installing them they had failed. A week ago they released new firmware that supposedly fixes the problem yet other users are reporting that the new firmware "turned many hard drives to paperweights". I haven't installed the new firmware yet but I'm hoping it'll come back to life long enough to copy the data onto another brand of hard drive.

Lesson #1: RAID isn't backup. If you put two of these drives into your RAID5 and both go bad you lose everything on all of the drives in the RAID. RAID5 can tolerate one failure not two.

Lesson #2: Check more carefully for user reviews before buying. I had heard of problems but I thought these were limited to the 1.5TB drives. Most 7200.11 drives seem to be affected by this regardless of capacity.

Lesson #3: Check for firmware updates before putting any data on the drives. In my case I don't think the firmware fix was out before I started using the disks but typically the drives ship with old firmware. When there is a problem like this drives continue to ship with deadly firmware even after the fix is available.

Latest firmware update:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951

One of many discussion threads about the problem:
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?82638

I bought this drive for a new home built HTPC and file server. I loaded WinXP on the computer and the Seagate drive worked really well until today. Now, the computer will not boot beyond the BIOS's drive detect. So, it seems the controller is bad. The drive never was detected when the BIOS was set to AHCI whereas my two Seagate 750 GB drives are detected in AHCI mode. I am going to send it back to Seagate. I am not happy they want $20 to send me a new drive ASAP after only 20 days of use. It's a big job reloading many GBs of backup. They should pay me $20+. Looking at the distribution of reviews it doesn't look like this drive will come close to Seagate's claimed MTBF. Too many early failures!

Bought new, this drive as installed in an Intel Quadx2 Power Mac. After 3 months it started making a whisking sound and the system no longer recognized it.

Getting technical support has been a study of delay and frustration. The phone support is "temporarily unavailable" but they apologize for that. Getting online support has consisted of looking through their library and waiting 4 wks on the average for replies to email requests for help. The replies are stock answers which make me think that they are not even reading the problem.

Warranty replacement is available, but right now I am trying to find out if I can restore any of the data before I give up the drive. They will not return the original.

As a backup drive, getting not that much traffic, it sucks.


SEP 09 UPDATE: Seagate must have received many complaints because they admitted that the problem was with the firmware. They remedied the problem and set up a program in which they fixed the problem with the drive, restored the data, paid for the postage and got it back to me within a week. So I revise my review to recommending the drive since it has worked fine since then.

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 you money. Run from this company.

I bought this (ST31000340AS 1TB Barracuda) drive in October of 2008 and it died yesterday after only seven months. The BIOS no longer recognizes it.

While I won't purchase another Barracuda, I may purchase another Seagate model because I've had good luck with this vendor's equipment in the past. Perhaps there are reliability issues with this particular model.

This drive failed in 3 weeks. It was running with a bunch of other hard drives I have, but this is the first time I've had something that failed so quickly. I switched over to Western Digital Green quickly-- by far the best switch I ever made.

Let's compare the latest Seagate with the latest Western Digital technologies. My Green 1T WD drives have been running for a few months without any problems so far. It's by far the quietest drives I've ever gotten, certainly much quieter than any of the Seagate Barracuda drives. It's also the most vibration free drives (Seagate is a bit noisier) and cool running-- heat shortens the lifespan of everything. The return policy for WD is much more hastle free-- you put in your credit card number and they'll hold the fees, and mail you a new drive immediately until you return the defective one, upon which they'll refund the credit card fees. Compare that to Seagate's return policy where they want to CHARGE you a set amount of cost if you want them to send you a replacement while you still have the defective drive.

Your 5 year Seagate warranty is useless when you lose data, and hundreds of man-hours. Guess what, Slash Dot headline today says "Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows." Ha! I used to use Seagate exclusively, but I'm no longer using them for at least a few years until they clean up.