Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive
by Seagate
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive
Customer Review: I believe problems are resolved !
Summary: 5 Stars
NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED:
I've watched the issue with these drives carefully for about 2 months. It looks like Seagate solved the problem and that a vocal few were ever really affected. By few I mean relative to the thousands sold. And I am not defending Seagate. This whole fiasco was unacceptable.
MY SYSTEM:
I picked up 8 of these drives. I'm running them in 4 separate DLink DNS-321 RAID boxes. I've copied about 4TB of data back and forth across them for days. My only firmware update needed was for the DLink so that it could properly handle the new 1.5TB drives.
In the end I believe all is well with both the drives and the DLink DNS-321. I will of course update this review immediately if I see any problems.
PERFORMANCE:
We are able to watch movies from this drive arrangement on 3 computers simultaneously across a 100mb network from the same drive while adding new files to the drive from a 4th computer.
This means I can be adding movies unattended to the system while watching an Epic Man movie on the plasma in the living room... while the kids are watching Monsters Inc in the bedroom... and the wife is off watching some chic flick in the Den. :)
The combination of DLink and these 1.5TB drives is fantastic and seems as stable as the WD 1TBs I was using previously.
PROPER DIAGNOSIS:
Don't confuse your drive DIEING after a week with the previous firmware problems of this particular drive. Blame the vendor that shipped the drive like it could bounce !
ON A SIDE NOTE:
I will say I am sick of Amazon, Tiger and other vendors shipping hard drives like they are indestructible ROCKS. Even if they arrive working, this inadequate packaging is certainly taking years off the life of our drives. One of my 8 arrived DEAD as a brick thanks to this nonsense. I am furious about this issue !
Will it take a class action to stop this behavior of guaranteeing future drive sales by damaging todays drives through deliberate mishandling of our purchases ?! Wake up AMAZON ! Wake up TIGER !
UPDATE: Dec 14 2009
One year later, I own 22 of these drives now. 12 are running daily in DNS-321 Raid boxes. The other 10 are used as back up drives in a drop in SATA adapter. No failures since 2 in the first few weeks, I believe due to poor packaging. About 6 of my drives came with the BAD firmware. I never had issues with that either. Call me blessed. I just think the DNS-321 and these drives work very well together.
UPDATE: Jan 8 2011
Another year passes and most of my 1.5TBs have all been pulled from DNS-321 RAID boxes and used as loose backup drives in a drop in SATA adapter. I've replaced them with the larger Seagate 2TB drives for larger capacity. NO FAILURES OF EITHER DRIVE 1.5TB or 2TB ! I have a couple Hitachi's and WD 2TBs. The Seagate drives are quieter and come off sleep in my RAID boxes faster than the other brands. All are used for video streaming over a network and do a fantastic job.
TIGER has been shipping drives MUCH BETTER. Amazon packagers have sent me drives packed poorly just 2 months ago. I requested replacements and Amazon handled the no charge exchange well. But they should NOT have been shipped that way.
Customer Review: Seagate gets a PLUS from me
Summary: 5 Stars
There is much discuasion of the performance of this drive when used in RAID arrays. [...]
The drive that notably beat the Seagate was the WD RE3. The real competition for the Seagate is the WD Caviar Black which the drive met or beat on virtually every test.
Some background info:Both the 1Tb WD Black and the Seagate 1.5Tb had an issue with long "timeouts" caused by the drives "self-standardization" or "cache-flushing" (I'm not SURE of the technical details) at intervals. This "off-line" appearance of the drives caused the drive to a) drop out of the RAID configuration b) be "ejected" from the array due to "read/write errors" c) "hang" for up to 30 seconds or so. Needless to say, these cause major problems in the speed and efficiency of the RAID arrays.
The most important thing to note is the major difference in corporate response to the using the drives in RAID arrays. I don't have the exact quote, but WD pretty much said "the Black is not approved for RAID use and will not be supported in this application. Use the RE3 drives". This varies MARKEDLY in the response of SEAGATE which was to work with users and issue firmware patches to meet customer expectatioins. The response of WD on this issue was, imho, unforgivable.. I mean its true that the drives, if applied to a true corporate environment RAID array which has very severe throughput and percent utilization challenges, is a special case. However, for home users, probably 90% of new motherboards contain SATA RAID options built in. For this reason combined with the great prices on HD's now encourage MANY MANY home users to begin using RAID configurations on their home setups. By any stretch of the imagination drives used this way get no more severe utilization than the same drives used in a single drive configuration.
[b]Huge KUDO's go to SEAGATE[/b] for the way in which they have tried to support this 1.5 Tb drive while WD needs to have their ears pinned back for their "corporate speak" response to this issue. The RE3 is, on a cost per Gb basis, about 2.25 times the cost of the Seagate 1.5Tb. The 1Tb Caviar Black is the "comparable" drive (still somewhat more expensive $/Gb than this Seagate) and it isn't supported by WD in a RAID array!!! Pffft on WD!
PS: I am a long time user of both brands of drives and previously was slightly biased toward WD.. but this incident weighs on my mind considerably
(edit added) To summarize:
Seagate 1.5Tb approx cost /Gb 0.085 .. RAID supported (need updates)
WD Black 1.0Tb approx cost /Gb 0.120 .. Not supported in RAID
WD RE3 1.0Tb approx cost /Gb 0.180 .. Certified for RAID
All have 5yr warranties, and based on my past experience (I've not had a failure with any of these drives) their warranty services are very good. But if you're having RAID application issues with the WD Black, you won't get support.
Customer Review: Good value, huge capacity, no issues.
Summary: 5 Stars
I use these drives as they were intended, for large scale storage. I'm not running them as boot drives, I'm not running them in crazy RAID configurations, and I'm not running them in a poorly ventilated enclosure. I have 7 of these drives now and I have had zero issues with them over the last 5+ months. I opperate two in external enclosures that house my lossless music collection.
One of these external drives is at work with me and running 8hrs a day 5 days a week for 5 months. No issues and I've done many full 1.2tb writes to this drive to update my music collection.
The other drives are used in my home theater pc (Silverstone LC-16) to house my entire DVD collection. Once again, zero issues for several months.
TAKE NOTE. All hard drives can fail. No one brand is any better than any other brand for failures, so don't fall for people crying wolf. I've been working with computers for 20+ years and have had 100's of hard drives in that time. I have had dead drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Micropolis, Hitachi, Maxtor, IBM, and a few others. With the exception of IBM's Deathstar line of hard drives, I've had the same luck with all of these brands.
Every so often, I have a drive die. But I don't hold it against any of the manufacturers just because I know this is just the luck of the draw. In the last 12mos I've had drives from Samsung, Western Digital, and Hitachi die on me. But, that never caused an issue, aside from annoyance, because I backup all my important data. Heck, my music collection is cloned on 3 drives just to be safe!
Update April 2010:
I now have 8 of these drives and have not had a single one die on me. Some of them get some pretty heavy use as swap drives where I back up my 1.3tb music collection to them and then use that drive to copy over to my various HTPC's throughout the house. I love the speed of these drives and they are reasonably quiet, but not enough to use in the HTPC in my bedroom which is only 5' from my head. In those cases, a slower green drive would work best. So far I have about 15 of these 1.5tb drives, some in my CarPC, external cases, HTPC's, and my main system. The only drives that have died on me were a Seagate LP 5900rpm model (it was in an external case) and 2 Western Digital green drives. As with all hard drives, no one brand is any better than any other. Anyone that says so generally is not a hardware techy with sufficient sample size to make any useful observations. Take it from me, I have over 25tb of storage space and every brand has died on me at least once, hence the need to diligently backup your stuff (just like I do)...
Customer Review: Uneventful and Boring (in a good way)
Summary: 5 Stars
The version of ST315003 41AS that arrived on my door step had firmware version CC1H which Seagate recommends to leave alone (and I have). To quote the manufacturer: "Note: If your drive has CC firmware, your drive is not affected and no further action is required. Attempting to flash the firmware of a drive with CC firmware will result in rendering your drive inoperable." and "Use our serial number check utility before applying this firmware update." I suggest you follow the recommendations before blindly updating due to the early history of firmware problems.
I use the drive as an external back-up drive on my iMac with Time Machine. It gets mounted on a BlacX Thermaltake eSATA + USB 2.0 device when I want to back up my machine. The drive is surprisingly quiet even with no enclosure. The mechanism gets quite warm to the touch if left in the BlackX for hours (there are other posts suggesting mitigations), but for my purposes the drive won't be powered on indefinitely). The packaging was OK. The mechanism itself was packaged a box about an inch larger in each dimension than the drive itself and suspended with a couple of plastic caps (like one of the user-provided pictures). The BlackX was in its own box, and both boxes sat in a larger box which could have contained 3x the stuff with the voids loosely filled with the plastic air bladders. The disk drive was in one corner of the box, the BlackX in the other. There was a definite shaking opportunity. However, the boxes were all blemish-free with no apparent internal damage. I don't use this as an internal drive with an interface that exploits the speed of the drive, so I can't comment on the performance other than it is quiet, reliable (thus far), of a great value, and more than meets my application's expectations.
Customer Review: Good, then bad, then good.
Summary: 5 Stars
Installing on a P4P800 1019 BIOS (ICH5 82801EB)
I popped the drive into my chassis and connected the cables. Windows XP recognized the drive in compmgmt.msc and I proceeded to format it to NTFS (originally tried FAT32 but no joy for files over 4gb, and as this thing is destined to be a media drive, that would have been a poor choice). I pushed all my media over to the drive which entailed about 300gb. I decided to move my swap file over to the drive as well, then restart the computer.
BIOS hangs on the drive detection. It sees it, acknowledges it, and even shows that it is SMART capable and ready, but no joy. Digging into the ICH5 design, I came across a lot of material concerning RAID array problems with this drive and southbridge, which had nothing to do with me. However I couldn't find any answers that helped me. I tried to install the drive as the only IDE/ATA drive available, and it still hung on drive detection.
I decided to pull the drive and reconnect the main boot drive, go into BIOS, and DISABLE LBA on the new drive's IDE slot. Every other setting I allowed. I turned off the computer, reconnected the SATA ribbon, restarted, and it worked just fine.
For good measure I SiSoft Sandra'd the drive's read ability, and it was 97 MBps, way ahead of the other comparables. I don't put all my stock in the test, but the drive reads and writes like a champ.
Here's to longevity.