Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
by Seagate
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List Price: Our Price: $159.99 You Save: $407.01 (72%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $69.93 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
Customer Review: neither solid nor reliable
Summary: 1 Stars
Bought new, this drive as installed in an Intel Quadx2 Power Mac. After 3 months it started making a whisking sound and the system no longer recognized it.
Getting technical support has been a study of delay and frustration. The phone support is "temporarily unavailable" but they apologize for that. Getting online support has consisted of looking through their library and waiting 4 wks on the average for replies to email requests for help. The replies are stock answers which make me think that they are not even reading the problem.
Warranty replacement is available, but right now I am trying to find out if I can restore any of the data before I give up the drive. They will not return the original.
As a backup drive, getting not that much traffic, it sucks.
SEP 09 UPDATE: Seagate must have received many complaints because they admitted that the problem was with the firmware. They remedied the problem and set up a program in which they fixed the problem with the drive, restored the data, paid for the postage and got it back to me within a week. So I revise my review to recommending the drive since it has worked fine since then.
Customer Review: Firmware Issues
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought two of these HDDs a little less than a year ago due to its good reviews here and installed them on my Windows Home Server.
However, after 10 months, one of them just bricked. I couldn't even mount it on a different computer. The BIOS wouldn't even recognize the drive.
Luckily WHS did a great job replicating my data to the other HDD.
After doing some research, I found out that these models have a firmware issue where the drive simply bricks itself. See article below.
[...]
While I'm not sure about the failure rate specified on the article above, search results indicate this to be a fairly common problem.
Seagate is currently shipping me a replacement under warranty. However, under their terms, they'll be shipping a refurbished HDD and not a new one. I'll be adding this refurbished drive in my WHS, but already expecting it to brick sometime in the future.
The reason for the 2 stars instead of 1, is that I like to be fair and these drive do have good performance and are fairly quiet. They do run a bit hot, but not an issue for me.
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.
Customer Review: BIOS no longer can detect the hard drive
Summary: 1 Stars
Bought one of these Seagate 1TB drives for my home PC. Wanted lots of storage for videos and what-not. Its a home PC, not an office PC so it gets less use as a result. Worked for almost a year, though it made enough noise, then one morning I went to boot up the PC and the BIOS could not even detect the hard drive. When I googled for more information I found this is an extremely common and permanent problem with this line of Seagate hard drives (not just the 1TB model). To get the data back you must take it to a data recovery specialist as the hard drive is not repairable once this occurs. Wish I had know about this issue back when I bought the unit. Unhappy does not begin to describe how I feel, especially since my other PC has been up and running since 1998 and never once had an issue with its hard drive (other than lack of space, hence the 1TB drive on the new PC)
Buy from another maker (by the way, Maxtor is now owned by Seagate so beware of their units also).
Customer Review: 1 out of 3 failed.
Summary: 2 Stars
Hmm...shoulda looked at more of the reviews before I made my purchase. Silly me for not paying a little more for the "enterprise" version of this drive. In short, these units shipped 11/26/2008 and the drive I affectionately named Bastion died 12/26/2008. And this merely after formatting the drive with nary a byte written. Thank God I didn't place anything valuable on there. I'll admit that I tend to run my drives for long stretches of time, but they're always in a temperature-controlled environment with plenty of airflow in the external eSATA chassis. In any case, I'll be backing up the other two drives post haste. With the "infant mortality" rate this line is seeing, I'm surprised there hasn't been more blowback from the public directed at Seagate. So I guess I'll be RMA'ing this one, but like the others, I don't expect I'll see much better quality in return. Seriously, Seagate, are you silently slipping Maxtor parts into your consumer drives? What are you smoking?!