These drives are solid performers though one must remain skeptical of the quality considering Seagate’s latest degradation of quality. But these 7200.11 series Barracuda’s are great drives and if this drive sustains functionality reliably for years, this is a great investment or maybe 2 for RAID 0 or 3 for RAID 0+1 :-).
I repair PCs and every drive that fails under warranty is replaced with a refurb. The refurbs crash at a much higher rate than normal, so I always advise my customers to buy new and use the replacement drive as a second drive for non-important or backed-up files. (not for backup) I would recommend the same caution here. Don’t use for mission critical or system files.
I saw that too LOL I wish. 10 gb per $1. Not that good of a deal new egg has a new one for a little more. It funny I was pricing some HDDs earlier today at work. I think the 750GB and 1.5 TB was the most GB per $
Model Number: ST3500630AS
Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s
Cache: 132 MBytes
Well, if it is the model number woot! has listed in their post, the ones here are 16MB as well. The 7200.11 model has the 32MB cache, the 7200.10 model has the 16MB – which is what is listed in their description. Of course, you could say they also list 132MB Cache, which means woot!'s description is very misleading, either way you look at it.
Absolutely not. They use laptop hdd’s I believe. The form factor isn’t there. I could be totally wrong though, but I’m going with like an 89% certainty here…
Recently bought this very drive new for $89.99, on sale, Office Max. Much noisier than the WD Caviar 250GB it replaced (3 years old, starting to click…) Obvious disc noises on every access. And now my monitor won’t recover from sleep, which googling suggests can be caused by disc errors, so I’m going to have to get spinrite to figure out whether it’s a hard drive problem or a video card problem (NVidia GeForce 6600). I’m not what you would call ecstatic about the drive.
I probably wouldn’t mind if the drive was sitting in an enclosure that only got turned on for backups.
YMMV.
Edit: I’m ASSUMING it’s actually the ST3500630AS that Windows device manager calls it. The box says it’s an ST3500641AS - RK, with 16 MB cache. (I’m looking at the box it came it, honest.)
Refurb with a 180 day warranty? No thanks. I’d rather spend the extra $20 and get a brand new one with the 5 year warranty. I’ve had very bad luck with refurb drives.