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: Better than most
Summary: 4 Stars
I've been using the Barracuda line of Seagate drives for years now and I work in the IT industry. Basically I don't see much difference in drive lifespan between the big drive vendors. Reliability varies from one model to the next but on average I see between 2.5 to 4 years lifespan on a given drive. Lately two of my Barracudas have gone bad. They had a nice 3 year lifespan and performed as expected. The thing that keeps me coming back to the Barracudas is the noise level. It is indeed, "whisper quiet". This seems to be the one thing that distinguishes it from the competition and the one reason I'll keep buying them.
As for warranty. Don't bother. I used to send in for warranty replacements on my drives. Every drive I've ever received back would last about 2-3 months and then die again. It's standard procedure for drive companies to send you remanufactured drives for your warranty exchanges. Unfortunately, the reliability quotient on remanufactured drives is very low. Also, you must pay for special packing material to return the drive if you didn't save the original packaging. (They won't accept it any other way.) The price of materials plus shipping doesn't justify the short lifespan the warranty replacements provide.
Also, most drives tend to get noisy after about year two. Even the wonderfully quiet Barracuda will start to sound like a mini jet engine after about 3 years. The noise level starts at near silence and very slowly progresses to intolerable noise after 3.5 years. This might actually be a good thing. After that long the drive media can start to deteriorate at which point it's a good idea to move your data to a healthy new drive or risk losing some (or all) of it.
Bottom line, you're paying for 2.5 to 5 years of service from your drive regardless of manufacturer. Your drive will become increasingly noisy with age. The warranty for almost all vendors is not terribly helpful due to the remanufactured drive failure statistics. So DO buy this drive but do so because it has one benefit over the competition. It's dead quiet when it's new.
Customer Review: Faulty firmware. Stay away.
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought two of these in December. Within two weeks of installing them they had failed. A week ago they released new firmware that supposedly fixes the problem yet other users are reporting that the new firmware "turned many hard drives to paperweights". I haven't installed the new firmware yet but I'm hoping it'll come back to life long enough to copy the data onto another brand of hard drive.
Lesson #1: RAID isn't backup. If you put two of these drives into your RAID5 and both go bad you lose everything on all of the drives in the RAID. RAID5 can tolerate one failure not two.
Lesson #2: Check more carefully for user reviews before buying. I had heard of problems but I thought these were limited to the 1.5TB drives. Most 7200.11 drives seem to be affected by this regardless of capacity.
Lesson #3: Check for firmware updates before putting any data on the drives. In my case I don't think the firmware fix was out before I started using the disks but typically the drives ship with old firmware. When there is a problem like this drives continue to ship with deadly firmware even after the fix is available.
Latest firmware update:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951
One of many discussion threads about the problem:
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?82638
Customer Review: Failed after only 3 weeks.
Summary: 1 Stars
This drive failed in 3 weeks. It was running with a bunch of other hard drives I have, but this is the first time I've had something that failed so quickly. I switched over to Western Digital Green quickly-- by far the best switch I ever made.
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.
Your 5 year Seagate warranty is useless when you lose data, and hundreds of man-hours. Guess what, Slash Dot headline today says "Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows." Ha! I used to use Seagate exclusively, but I'm no longer using them for at least a few years until they clean up.
Customer Review: Known to be unreliable
Summary: 1 Stars
This drive has a known reliability issue with a failure rate of around 30-40% after a few months of use. Thousands of people have reported the same error (just search the Internet for the model number). The problem is with the firmware shipped with the drive (SD15). You must upgrade the firmware to SD1A or it will all of the sudden stop working. If your drive hasn't failed yet, you can upgrade the firmware yourself using a tool provided by Seagate. But if the drive has already failed you have no choice but to have a data recovery service upgrade the firmware for you. I found this out because one of my drives turned into a brick with no warning. Fortunately after I called Seagate technical support, and persisted that the problem was with the drive firmware and not my computer, they agreed to fix the drive and perform data recovery for free. This entire process took 7 days, during which I was without a computer. But when I got the drive back, it worked fine and no data was lost. Still, the is the worst experience I've ever had with a hard drive, and I am never going to buy a Seagate product again. They should have issued a recall and advised all owners to upgrade the firmware *before* the drives failed instead of ignoring the problem for several months.
Customer Review: This Product is a Disaster!
Summary: 1 Stars
You can expect it to work great long enough for you to copy a lot of data onto it, then one fine day you boot up and BIOS cannot detect it. Not just a problem with drives manufactured in Thailand, mine was made in China. So it's a design problem, not a production problem, and apparently in the firmware.
To date Seagate has basically stonewalled on the dead drives while making muddled attempts to provide firmware upgrades for drives still working. Meanwhile they continue to market these defective products. (What are you supposed to do when you're in a hole? Stop digging.)
Update as of 15 Aug 2010 (foregoing was originally posted in Jan 2009):
I'm surprised to see so many reports of the firmware issue a year and a half after it started appearing. Must be a lot of old drives still in stock and selling slowly due to the bad reputation.
I was able to repair the drive using techniques described on the web (not for the technically timid, but desperate times call for desperate measures), and in fairness I'll state I've had no problem with the drive in the year and a half since (but you better believe I have it well and truly backed up).