Customer Reviews

Seagate ST3500320AS Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB SATA 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(40)

 

 

UPDATE: A newer generation of this drive, the 7200.12, Bulk/OEM version, has been available for a while now and has better performance in terms of speed and power consumption. So that's likely a better option.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

As of now, this is the state of the art Seagate 1TB drive. It uses just three drive platters (the thing that looks like a compact disc in the photo - there's actually a stack of those inside your hard drive!). Older 1TB drives used 4 or even 5 platters.

Less platters means greater data density, which means faster data transfer speeds. Less platters also means cooler operating temperatures, usually.

The 7200.11 line of drives uses 333GB platters. The new 7200.12 drives with 500GB platters is starting to be released - a one platter, 500GB drive is available now. A two platter 1TB drive should be out sometime in the next month or two.

By the way, a few notes about OEM / bulk drives:

- OEM or bulk means it comes in plain packaging, with no software, screws or cables. If you're replacing a drive, that may not be a problem. But if it's a new installation, you'll need a SATA data cable and (often) a power adapter.

- As of 1/3/2009, Seagate has reduced the warranty on their OEM hard drives from 5 years to 3 years. Not a big deal to me, as after 3 years I'm not going to pay to return the drive and put the 3+-year-old model refurbished drive I get back in my machine anyway. The real issue is, what's the reliability of the drive, so you don't need the warranty? It's very hard to get a good answer on that.

Many people would say buy a Seagate, Western Digital, or Hitachi drive, and after that, it's a roll of the dice. Certainly making sure your fans are working and you clean out the dust bunnies helps!

I'm in the IT industry and have had installed, swaped, formated hundreds of hard drives in my life. Hard drive failure is normal, and it's expected. What I've found out is that MTBF that manufacturers publish has very little correlation with reality, since reality is affected by factors such as temperature, handling, etc. What they publish is in a perfect laboratory environment-- not what people normally have at home. In my past, I have used Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Seagate has alway been high on my list because of their reliability and their 5 year warranty.

Personally, reliability is a huge concern for me because I take tons of precious pictures of my family & baby and I cannot afford to lose them. That's why I always build RAID systems with different drives from different manufacturers, and in certain cases same manufacturer but with very different batches. After only 3 weeks, this drive failed. Since it was on a raid system, no big deal. I swapped in another drive, and it to Amazon. My other 750G failed after a year's use. That's 2 Seagate failures within 30 days of timespan-- not a good impression so far.

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.

Seagate used to be well known for its quality in the early 90s. I used to trust them exclusively, but throughout the years their quality has decreased tremendously, and I no longer recommend using them. It happened to Maxtor in the early days when megabytes were a lot (Maxtor drives were notoriously bad in the 80s). I guess every good successful company, in their quest to drive up more and more profits, take shortcuts to make more money and eventually shoot them in the foot.

Guess what, SlashDot has a headline "Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows." Ha! I am not surprised. Sorry, but Seagate is just not living up to its reputations anymore. Your 5 year warranty is useless when you can't recover precious data such as pictures of your family/baby. Regardless of how good a manufacturer is, I cannot emphasize how important it is to building RAID-1, or at MINIMUM do thorough backups every once in a while. You'll be protecting hundreds of man-hours for your corporation (if this is for corporate use), and hundreds of tears for your family (for family use).

I purchased a computer in December 2008 that contained a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HD. The HD worked terrifically and I had no complaints about it for the first 9 months that I owned it (much longer than most people have owned one before leaving a 4 or 5 star review!!!) but the HD just now failed (August 2009). The disk does not spin and the computer does not recognize that a hard drive even exists, not even attempting to access it. The data is not recoverable by the usual data recovery processes, meaning recovery must be done in a lint-free environment at a cost of $2,500 or more. Based on the research I have done since the hard drive failed, it is apparent that the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDs are failing at an alarming rate (reportedly estimated upwards of around 30-40% by some data recovery experts.) While Seagate denies that the 7200.11 HDs are defective, those issuing RMAs are apparently being instructed to have the failed 7200.11 HDs sent to Seagate for replacement with the 7200.12 HDs, rather than having the 7200.11 HDs repaired. This appears to me, and many others with failed 7200.11 HDs, a silent acknowledgement by Seagate that the 7200.11 drives are defective and non-repairable. Do not believe that this issue is resolved, or can be resolved, as Seagate doesn't even appear to believe that. If you are considering buying a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HD, don't. If you already have one, back up all of your files immediately and replace your hard drive with something else! I wouldn't have even given 1 star if that were possible.

stay away look for updates in other reviews for failures.



Pros: Works fine until it dies!

Cons: I have had 3 failures of this model disk in the last 45 days in 2 different systems. These were not gamer systems and are well cooled in large Antec boxes. Clearly Seagate has a problem and expect additional failures - next time I will put the service / shipping charges towards Western Digital units rather than replacing junk with junk.

Cons: ... died without any warning after two months.

The return policy is horrible - you are literally not allowed to use packing peanuts, bubble wrap, or newspaper to package a dead drive when you return it for warranty replacement. It has to be 2 inches of foam rubber in a corugated box or your warranty is void.

Also, you are sent a REFURBISHED drive as a replacement.

You are also required to pay for shipping the drive back, and can wait as long as 30 days from the day they receive it to get your new one.

This last point isn't too bad in itself, but when mixed with everything else, it's stupid.

Oh, and the RMA form on the website was down for two or three days before I could actually get it sent in. Customer service couldn't even fill out an RMA request for me - the entire system was down for "maintenance".

They also make sure to withhold the detail about packing until you already submitted the form... and possibly gave them $20 to avoid waiting a month for your replaceme

Other Thoughts: What happened, Seagate? I have two more of the older 7200.10 drives in here and they've run absolutely beautifully for the year I've had them - as a matter of fact, they're the only thing holding my degraded RAID5 up right now. I still have the old 160GB drive that came with my Dell five years back, and it still works like a charm. I order a couple 7200.11 drives, one arrives DOA and the other dies within two months without any warning.

Cons: Had a SD15 failure. Drive was making a high-pitched noise just before it failed on machine reboot. Was able (with effort) to get SD1A flashed onto drive. But then drive became very noisy -- every few seconds, it would sound like the head was tracking accross the drive (a 'farting' noise, as some have said). Performance would also drop to near zero at these times.

Got a warranty replacement from Seagate (which cost me $20) -- another drive with SD15! Sure enough, one week after install this one just started to make the high-pitched noise, so I'm typing this before I'm computerless once again.

Other Thoughts: I will never, EVER buy Seagate again. I will do everything I can to make sure no one I know buys their products, either. Shame, shame, shame on you, Seagate.

All versions of this drive manufactured prior to Jan 2009 may be affected by a serious firmware bug. A firmware update has been released but according to multiple reports the update may brick this drive. I would recommend staying away from this model until the affected drives are out of the supply chain.

It bricked right around the six month mark. My BIOS won't even recognize that it exists anymore. I've switched SATA cables and power plugs and tried it in a completely different machine and it still isn't recognized and so I'm reasonably certain that it just plain failed. I am a complete backup fanatic and it is still under warranty so this is nothing more than a slight hassle for me personally, but beware!

I no longer recommend this drive since the 7200.12 series came out and one of my drives died. I would like to change my rating to three stars.

The drive I bought from PEAK ZONE was shipped without a antistatic bag and it died, do not buy from them.


this is a oem, meaning just a drive in a antistatic bag, no screws, cables or literature or box.

this drive needs a firmware update, I had troubles with one of my drives, after updating with new firmware which applies to all 7200.11 drives they work much better and quiter.

You must remove a jumper to enable sata 300 mbps transfers, it was very hard to remove because the edge is below the socket. I use a small screwdriver and the jumper went flying somewhere into the room. I tested it with h2benchw a test program used by toms hardware to compare drives. the results (most relavent part) are pasted below. to summarize the min read speed was 49.8MB/sec, average was 84.0 MB/sec, max 113MB/sec. Write speed minimum 49.6MB/sec, average was 83.1MB/sec and max 111.7MB/sec

Disk: ST3500320AS
Capacity: CHS=(60801/255/63), 976768065 sectors = 476938 MByte

Interface transfer rate w/ block size 128 sectors at 0.0% of capacity:
Sequential read rate medium (w/out delay): 112837 KByte/s
Sequential transfer rate w/ read-ahead (delay: 0.62 ms): 175203 KByte/s
Repetitive sequential read ("core test"): 135101 KByte/s
Sequential write rate medium (w/out delay): 75328 KByte/s
Sequential transfer rate write cache (delay: 0.93 ms): 166107 KByte/s
Repetitive sequential write: 80768 KByte/s

Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 84019.3, min 49850.8, max 113113.2 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 83129.2, min 49696.5, max 111786.7 [KByte/s]

Random access read: average 12.22, min -1.28, max 25.70 [ms]
Random access write: average 7.03, min -5.63, max 31.49 [ms]
Random access read (<504 MByte): average 6.13, min -3.69, max 16.74 [ms]
Random access write (<504 MByte): average 2.72, min -5.59, max 96.31 [ms]

Application profile `swapping': 12745.4 KByte/s
Application profile `installing': 18513.2 KByte/s
Application profile `Word': 37773.7 KByte/s
Application profile `Photoshop': 26142.8 KByte/s
Application profile `copying': 28029.1 KByte/s
Application profile `F-Prot': 11437.4 KByte/s
Result: application index = 20.0
ATA disk: ST3500320AS
Serial #: 9QM4A4J3
Firmware: SD15
Version of specification: ATA-ATAPI-8
Supported UDMA modes: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
UDMA mode 6 active.
capacity (28-bit addressing): 268435455 sectors (131072.0 MByte)
Capacity (48-bit addressing): 976773168 sectors (476940.0 MByte)
acoustic management not supported.

I purchased three 500GB versions of these back at the beginning of 2009 for a system build where I used two in a RAID configuration and the third drive as a back up. Just 8 months later all three drives are failing: each has a SMART problem (detected by Windows and by Seagate SeaTools) and two of the three also fail SeaTools short drive tests. I use these drives in an extremely well ventilated Antec P182 case that has a separate hard drive bay that keeps them isolated from the heat produced by the motherboard and graphics card, so heat is NOT the reason these drives are failing. I believe the real issue is with poor quality components. I use a fair number of other Seagate drives and have had no problems with them. I bought literally about a dozen 2.5" 7200rpm drives for upgrading various notebooks (Mac and PC) without any issues--for a while I was replacing all my friend's drives after I sped my macbook 13 drive up from 4200RPM to 7200RPM and was showing everyone the performance improvements... In any case the problems I've had with these drives seem to be an issue limited to this particular version.

The only positive thing I can say is that at least I learned these drives were going bad before they completely died. I was able to back up all my data to my NES array. I've filled out RMAs through the Seagate webpage and will hopefully get replacement drives soon, but I don't know that I'll actually trust them considering my 100% fail rate with the three I already own. I may decide to replace them with WD drives instead.

Even though there were warnings about problems with the firmware on these hard drives I needed a new hard drive in the worst way. I have preferred Seagate hard drives for at least ten years now, after many problems with Maxtor and Western Digital. I wasn't disappointed. This Seagate hard drive works flawlessly, and I didn't even need to use the firmware I downloaded a month ago. When you are relying on a computer to make your living there is nothing that matters more than having quality components. My old Seagate hard drives are still in service being used by people who can't afford to buy computers.

I bought this about six months ago when the price was much higher, but I still feel like I got an exceptional deal. This had NCQ (native command queuing) that most drives do not. That means when files are highly fragmented, the disk drive itself intelligently reads the files according to where they are positioned on the disk and then puts it back together before sending data to the computer. The result is a faster disk than one that doesn't have this feature. I had zero problems with this disk, unlike one of the 1.5 TB drives. I had to send that one back for exchange and got one back that vibrates slightly. So, I plan to purchase another 1 TB disk with NCQ to complement the one I have. I may make it into a RAID configuration.