Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
by Seagate
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
Customer Review: Good value with Seagate Drive
Summary: 4 Stars
Installed and configured without any issues. Be aware that this is NOT a retail version of the drive, just the bare drive. If you don't have SATA cables you will need to buy one as well.Customer Review: amazon, seagate
Summary: 4 Stars
this hd is great except for one thing, in the first week i tried to install the OS several times and it didn't let me, in the second week it installed flawlesly, no problems since.Customer Review: Excellent Drive once you receive a good one
Summary: 3 Stars
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.Customer Review: Hopefully it doesn't die on me... Update: One down, one to go.
Summary: 3 Stars
I got two of these for Christmas (for a software RAID) and immediately knew that something was off. The BIOS took a while to scan one of the SATA ports and eventually failed, unable to find a drive. "Great, DOA" I thought.. After a few reboots, the system did find the drive, but it also said there was a SMART failure. smartmontools showed a failing drive with a Spin_Retry_Count of 54, along with a number of concerning values on other attributes, and the drive was unable to pass short self-tests. Oddly enough, long self-tests passed. After some research, I booted the SeaTools CD and did a low level format, then rebooted. The drive passed the SMART check in the BIOS and short self-tests as well.
Seagate's phone support, while fairly nice, wasn't particularly helpful. I was regularly put on hold over the course of a 45 minute call as they conferred with coworkers. I would have liked to get some answers on values of several SMART attributes, especially the high spin retry, but they didn't have any. In the end, they said that if the drive passed self-tests, it was good to go.
It's been a few weeks now, and although the Spin_Retry_Count has increased by 2 on both and other attributes are fluctuating daily, the drives appear to be functioning normally. Hoping for the best, expecting the worst.
*Update* 01/30/2009: The drive with the high spin retry just died on me. It doesn't appear to be the bricking problem reported by so many, supposedly fixed by the SD1A firmware (which both drives were flashed to), just a regular old drive failure. Against my better judgment, I assembled a raid5 using these and a new 1TB WD Caviar Black, when uncorrectable sectors started to appear, *just* as I was finishing the file restoration. A few minutes later smartmontools reported a failing drive and mdadm pulled it. Hopefully the remaining Seagate drive holds up until I can get a second WD Black in.
This was the first time I've used something other than WD for my main system drives, and it's been a terrible experience. Sure, every manufacturer produces drives that fail at one time or another, but this combined with my initial problems and their firmware fiasco has scared me away. I definitely won't be buying Seagate again anytime soon, and I suggest you steer clear of their 1 and 1.5TB (AS) models, for now.
Customer Review: Reliability issues
Summary: 3 Stars
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.