Customer Reviews

Seagate Momentus 7200 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 16MB Cache 2.5 Inch Internal NB Hard Drive ST9500420AS-Bare Drive

5 star:		(125)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(37)

 

 

Read the 5 pages of support issues on this drive in Seagate's forums or the 30+ pages in Apple's forums (and note: this isn't an issue exclusive to Apple systems)... or read the reviews at Newegg... this drive has MAJOR reliability issues.

Don't believe all these 5 star reviews from people who reviewed the drive the day they installed it. It will run great when you first put it in.

But 15-60 days in you will start hearing clunking noises. Your system will start freezing for a second or two here or there. The drive's load cycle count will start to skyrocket (to the point that even under "normal" use the drive will fail within a year by Seagate's own numbers). If you're really unlucky, the drive will suddenly die.

Don't play russian roulette with your data. Don't fall for this drive's relatively low price or nice specs.

The most important spec in a hard drive is reliability. This one sucks.

I am not going to say there is something wrong with these drives, because at the end of the day I'm only one guy with a bad experience. I'll just offer my review here so that people get a full perspective. I have had two of these fail on me in a row, failing offline SMART tests. When it was working, the drive was very fast and quiet, though, so I can certainly understand the high marks people give these drives when they work.

I think it is fair to say that Seagate is really running these at the ragged edge of what is possible. While the transfer rates can approach 90 Mb/s at the edge of the platter, according to a few quick tests I ran, the transfer rate fluctuates greatly, and the drive shows a pretty constant stream of software-corrected (ECC) errors. In other words, you're not losing data, but the data coming off the drive is on the border of what is readable, such that the drive needs to rely on error correction and/or rereads (hence the fluctuating speeds) to get the data off. I base these conclusions on the fact that tests of data on the inside of the platter (which has much less speed) are much more reliable (albeit slower).

If you do decide to get one of these, do yourself a favor and backup (which you should do anyways, because all hard drives are subject to fail at any time).

I was really worried to buy this drive cause of the reviews I read, but I bought it because of the reputation of seagate, as my old drive was seagate momentus too but 160 GB, I did replace it with this 500 GB model, and found no Vibration as many people claimed, the same as Hitachi, western Digital.

I ordered two hard drives
Installed the first in a Macbook Pro 17" 2.4 GHz SR, everything is perfect. I am not sure about the battery life after replacing the drive as I did upgrade the OS to snow leopard afterwords so I can't judge the battery level fairly.

The second drive did install it in a White Macbook 2.4 Ghz, to replace a 5400rpm 160 GB Hitachi, there is a real significant difference between the old Hitachi, and this drive for sure, the Macbook is really flying now, boot times are faster, and applications load fast too. The over All performance did boast I guess 40% more.

White Macbook:
Vibration: No
Speed: Yes
Battery consumption: Yes, the battery don't last as the 5400 Hitachi
Worth Upgrade: yes 100 %

Macbook Pro:
Vibration: No
Speed: Yes
Battery consumption: Yes, the battery don't last as the 7200 160 GB Momentus
Worth Upgrade: yes 100 %

I do recommend this product

My drive started to make a loud "clunk" sound about a week after I installed it. I just spoke with Seagate warranty department and they said that it would cost me $19.95 to have them ship me a new drive under warranty. The warranty rep said that neither he nor his managers have the authority to waive this fee. It'll cost me nothing to return it to the retailer as defective, so I'll do that today instead.

Edited to add:

The replacement drive is now making the "clunk" sound as well and needs to be replaced. This time, I'll go with a brand other than Seagate.

Warranty experience: The second failed drive was shipped to Seagate eleven days ago and they still show my claim as "not recieved". According to my delivery confirmation query, USPS delivered it to their location right on the border of Mexico and Texas, so I assume that Seagate then ships it to some warehouse in Mexico where the recieving process is SLOWLY completed. Speaking with Seagate's stern warranty reps was interesting: If you use bubble wrap or packing peanuts when you ship the drive, they will void the warranty! Seagate offers a .pdf file with very strict shipping instructions, including a specific 2-inch thick foam that you must use for packaging. I wonder how many warranty claims Seagate invalidates for failure to meet their unusually weird shipping instructions.

In the meantime, I installed a 500GB Hitachi drive that runs perfectly. No more clunking and my notebook no longer vibrates like a blender. The Hitachi drive is completely silent, fast, and runs much colder than the Seagate clunker.

I bought this hard drive to put in my 13 inch macbook pro. I had read a few reviews from people that found the hard drive too noisy, or had it vibrate a lot. I have had no problems at all. It's as quiet as the previous hard drive (I can't hear it even when it's going full speed unless I put my ear right down to the computer), and doesn't vibrate at all. It works great! And it sped up my computer a bit too. All around good drive. Definitely recommend!

This particular drive was housed in my mid-2009 MacBook Pro, purchased directly from Apple and customized (3.06GHz processor, 500GB hard drive). I purchased the system on August 06, 2009.

On February 02, 2010, the hard drive suffered a complete failure. I was not informed what model of drive was in the system at the time of purchase, but when the Apple Store returned the failed drive to me so that I could try to extract data from it, I learned that it was this particular Seagate model. (And they replaced it with the EXACT SAME DRIVE. Meaning that I have to purchase a new drive of my own out of pocket, from a manufacturer of hard drives that hasn't ended up with critical drive failures every single time I have used one. And unfortunately, 7200RPM 500GB drives are not common.)

I cannot stress enough that you DO NOT PURCHASE THIS HARD DRIVE. It has known reliability issues and numerous reports of complete failures, and there is very little chance that any data recovery will be possible -- not even in prohibitively expensive clean room recovery situations. The drive frequently fails within six months of use. I currently have the failed drive in an enclosure and hooked up to a PC running Kernel for Macintosh in the hope of possibly recovering a tiny bit of data, but it's not looking good. If recovery fails absolutely, I will be opening the drive to examine the disk for known, common damage indicators (such as the 'death ring' around the spindle).

Tomorrow, I will be going out and purchasing a new drive to install myself. I will not have this happen again. Do not let positive reviews and excuses about this being a 'rare failure' lure you into purchasing this shoddy piece of equipment, known to be defective but still being distributed! This is one of the most unreliable hard drives I have ever had the displeasure of using. I have had bad luck in general with Seagate drives, even on external disks that are not being taxed by running an OS.

Reliability is key in a hard drive, and this drive does not measure up in the least. If you need a larger hard drive like I do, or at least one that spins at 7200RPM for those of us who run software that requires frequent data access, I recommend purchasing a lower capacity 7200RPM drive from another manufacturer (Hitachi and Western Digital have yet to fail me), plus a second internal drive and a separate enclosure to use as additional portable storage.

We can, of course, wait for Seagate to release a firmware update that fixes the problems with this drive. However, after months of silence on the matter, it's clear that they're as reliable as this hard drive is -- not at all. Do what you have to do to avoid buying this unit, and if you get a new notebook computer, make sure the FIRST thing you do is check what model hard drive you have. If it's this one, scrap it ASAP and buy something that actually works. Notebook hard drives are cheap. Data recovery (with no guarantee of success) is not, and neither is your data itself. Protect it. Back up regularly, and don't buy Seagate.

I used this HDD on my MacBook Pro instead of the original one. I expected it to be much faster as it's 7200RPM. But that's not the case.
Speed is ok while accessing data files, but it still takes some time when launching "heavy" applications.

My only problem now is trying to launch BootCamp on vmware Fusion (Win Vista on BootCamp runs great on its own). I still need to get that issue fixed!

I didn't notice any noise from the drive as I read in some reviews, so I believe it's quite enough for whoever works in the night when there's silence surrounding him like I do.

Great product and recommended for whoever is looking to expand his MBP's HDD.

I bought this drive a few months ago and about a week after installed it started to make a noise that sounds like a bunch of marbles are loose inside my MacMini. It also makes beeping noises here and there...The noises are starting to become more prevalent so I went to Seagates site to have it swapped out...they want to charge me 19.99 in order to send me out one first so that way there isn't any down time...What a crock!...I wouldn't recommend getting this drive or any Seagate product...They obviously know they have problem with their drives because they are charging you 19.99 to have it replaced in a timely fashion..Should have bought a HITACHI!!!!

I purchased one of these to replace my laptop hard disk. Everything was working fine for about 5 days, and then the disk failed - badly. There were many failed sectors which could not be remapped, and eventually the disk couldn't be read at all.

Amazon set up an exchange for me I got a second disk. This process was really quite nice because they shipped me the replacement disk before receiving the failed one, and they shipped it next day (the original shipping method I had selected).

The replacement disk lasted for 5 days also before failing. At this point I gave up on the seagate momentus, and returned it for good. It is possible, but unlikely, that I just happened to get two bad disks in a row. I would suggest looking to another drive for your storage needs for the time being.

I needed a hard disk for my Sony Vaio laptop as I was getting cyclic redundancy check failures. I wanted a 1 TB hard disk (after all, I am spending the bucks, why not go for the trophy capacity) - but soon realized after some research that all 1 TB 2.5" hard disks in the market now are little thicker (taller) than most laptops have space for. Unless yours is a new laptop that can take a 12.5 mm thick hard disk, you have to stick to the standard 9.5 thick ones - which means you cannot get 1 TB, at least now. I am sure 6 months down the line, WD or Seagate or Samsung's gonna come up with a regular sized 1 TB disk. Anyway, I downgraded my capacity wish to 750 GB, and after some research, zeroed in on this one - reading some good favorable reviews on newegg and tigerdirect. I went with Amazon because of Amazon's great return policy (it is a hard disk to be shipped on a truck after all). Fit perfectly. Lots of space now, don't know what to do with it actually! Unless this one dies on me before its average life expectancy is over, I am going to stick to this 5 star review!