Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500 GB SATA 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST3500418AS

Other products by Seagate

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B001VKYA5E
• Item model number: ST3500418AS
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #6 in

  Electronics > Computers & Accessories > Internal Desktop Components > Hard Drives

• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 1, 2009

Product Description

Product Description

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drive delivers excellent power savings without sacrificing performance, giving customers the ability to manufacture eco-friendly PC systems and external storage systems that meet energysavings requirements. The drive combines proven technology with expert manufacturing to deliver up to 1 TB of desktop storage. With the Barracuda 7200.12 drive, our customers can have the best of both worlds—top hard-drive performance and a high-capacity drive with a very small eco-footprint. Seagate is committed to Minimizing the impact of our products and operations on the environment. We have implemented production efficiency measures, such as replacing or renovating less-efficient equipment, resulting in a 20 percent increase in production efficiency on a per-hard-drive basis. In just six months this delivered a savings of 158.93 million kWh, or enough energy to power nearly 15,000 U.S. homes for one year. Seagate also has deployed aggressive waste minimization and recycling programs in facilities worldwide. The Barracuda product family complies with the Restriction of Hazardous Substance (RoHS) directive that limits the use of hazardous materials in electronic goods.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Screamer, June 22, 2009

By	Francis Taylor - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have measured read and write speeds of well over 100 MB/sec on the outer tracks of this drive. This is the fastest drive I have ever seen, and I have 10000 RPM SCSI drives. The price is right, too. This is an ideal drive for RAID. It is low profile and low power so you can cram them into your case without worry of overheating.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Massive Storage Utilizing Perpendicular Recording Using Only Two Platters, August 16, 2009

By	Peter D. Mar (San Francisco California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1 TB SATA 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000528AS (Electronics)

Here is my review of the OEM, Seagate 12th series ST31000528AS 1 TB Barracuda dual platter perpendicular recording very spaciousg SATA desktop hard drive. This particular drive comes with platters with density level of 500 GB each. For this model line, there are various sizes ranging from 160 GB to 1 TB in size. I've noticed particularly, larger capacity drives comes in SATA only. It's getting harder and harder to buy a hard drive in the EIDE form, because EIDE interface is on its way out. It's being phased out by most hard drive manufacturer as well as computer motherboard manufacturer. For those of you with older computers that has only EIDE interface, you may be able to connect your computer to a SATA hard drive or optical drive by using a converter card. This card is inserted in the back of the hard drive converting a SATA drive to EIDE.

I've purchased this drive to use as storage only, and petition it as one large petition of 931 GB. After installation of this drive on my computer, I use Seagate's excellent free DiscWizard software to petition the hard drive. The process is relatively quick unlike using Windows to do this. I've downloaded this hard drive utility program from the Seagate website. This is a 128 MB download and may take a while on a slower Internet connection. This program will only run if you have at least a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive on board. This hard drive utility program is really a stripped-down version of Acronis True Image Home. Partly because of this excellent utility program that I decided to stick with Seagate instead of defecting to Western Digital instead for this purchase. With this program, you can clone your old hard drive to the new under Windows or using the bootable CD R which you can make with this program. You can use this program to backup your entire hard drive as well and save it on your storage drive. If anything should happen to your Windows installation, all you would have to do is to restore it using this program in its entirety. Doing it this way, you would not have to install Windows plus updates and all of the programs that you use all over again. You can do this by just simply inserting the bootable CD, restart the computer and then follow the prompts to restore your computer. Unlike previous programs of this nature, this program does an excellent job of it. After the cloning or restore, everything appears to work fine. In my example for instance using maximum compression, I was able to save my 37 GB which was the total of my "C" Windows petition as a 19 GB file on my storage drive.

This unreliable problem with the 11th series because its firmware problems which hurt Seagate's reputation tremendously. It's also because of that, that Seagate reduced the warranty from five years to three for consumer grade hard drives. Although, the server class NS series hard drives still remains at five years warranty. According to some of the professional reviews, they reported that this hard drive is extremely fast in fact almost as fast as one running at 10,000 RPM. I tried benchmarking this hard drive using Sandra. The test result shows a starting point at 129 MB a second read speed with a drive index of 102. The test results shows that this hard drive is slightly faster than my previous 11th series Seagate hard drive. This hard drive runs extremely quiet and relatively cool with temperature not exceeding 32°C on my computer so far. This is about 5°C less when compare with my previous hard drive installed in the same position under the same conditions. This according to Hard Disk Sentinel, the hard drive monitoring program. Because of the fast read and write speed of this hard drive as well as my previous one which was the Seagate 11th series, I was able to copy my files over from my old to this one in relatively short time. The old drive will be installed on my old computer to be used as storage or as Windows drive.

Update July 17, 2009: So far, This drive has been performing extremely well and I am quite happy with the performance. Since purchased, according to S.M.A.R.T. I have 164 hours on the clock. It hasn't produced any unusual noises or other glitches.

Update August 16, 2009: According to S.M.A.R.T. the hard drive had a minor problem, one reallocated section moved to the spare section. Other than this, the drive still works extremely well. As long as I'm not getting more new bad sections constantly it should be all right. Regardless of what, I think Seagate is slipping in quality control. Even the best of hard drives comes manufactured with bad section, that get mapped out during the first initialization process at the factory so it doesn't show up under S.M.A.R.T.. This is usually the case, why when you receive the drive it appears perfect.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Few Complaints, April 29, 2009

By	Grant Apperson (Auburn AL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is not a bad drive at all. the seek time is fast and it does not seem to overheat. the only think that i dont like is the fact that the drive is fairly loud when it is starting up, while searching, and writing. i have the 1 TB model though and it may be louder than the 500 GB