Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS by Seagate
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Digital camera reviews of Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
Digital camera 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.
Digital camera Review: Big problems
Summary: 1 Stars
Stay well away from these drives. They have a major firmware bug that will set the drive to busy, and lock you out. No PC's BIOS will not be able to see the drive. You will lose your data and get a refurbed drive back from Seagate that may well do the same again.
There are loads of stories about this all over the web, even on Seagate's own forums, but they deny there is a problem. I had one of these drive die in six weeks with no warning at all.
Digital camera Review: Broke in less than 2 months
Summary: 1 Stars
I don't usually write reviews, but this is a frustrating experience that I don't want anyone else to have to live with.
I bought this item on August 25, 2008 and the installation was very smooth. I easily replaced my one 250 GB Western Digital that came with my desktop, and I was very excited about all the extra space that was going to be available in my new 1 TB Seagate.
I came home today (Oct 21, 2008) to see my computer boot up as "Boot disk failure," which basically means that my computer thinks I have no hard drive at all.
Now this message popped up once or twice a couple weeks before, but for those times, everyone worked fine again after a simple restart. (I should have known better and backed up my files, but I made the mistake of trusting this product for a bit bit longer)
I tried restarting countless times, but there was no hope in it this time. Now I was geek enough to open my desktop to try whatever I can to fix the problem, so I experimented using a different part of the power cable, plugging the SATA cable into different parts of the motherboard, switching the orientation of the SATA cable, and even putting it in my 3.5" SATA to USB enclosure. None of those worked. I heard the drive spinning, but both my desktop and my laptop (via USB) could not read any data from it, much less boot from it.
To confirm everything, I tested my original 250 GB Western Digital hard drive on my SATA enclosure, and that worked perfectly fine. I even put it back in my desktop and it boots up no problem. So the I was assured that my Seagate, and only my Seagate, has failed.
I'll admit that it's my fault for not ALWAYS backing up EVERYTHING. I guess I trusted Seagate a bit too much. I had almost 1/2 a TB of data in there that are now inaccessible, and I'll probably never see them again. I really didn't expect it to break down that fast. I don't even want to claim the warranty because I don't want to have it break down again and lose up to 1 TB of data again. And my Amazon return policy expired on Oct 2, just several weeks ago (how convenient).
My bottom line is to just RECONSIDER BUYING THIS PRODUCT if you treasure your data or if you know you don't readily have a back up for everything all the time.
I'll probably go back to Western Digital or something. Sorry, Seagate, you lost me with this one. Hard drives just leaves no room for such crummy reliability.
Digital camera Review: Buyer Beware
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this (ST31000340AS 1TB Barracuda) drive in October of 2008 and it died yesterday after only seven months. The BIOS no longer recognizes it.
While I won't purchase another Barracuda, I may purchase another Seagate model because I've had good luck with this vendor's equipment in the past. Perhaps there are reliability issues with this particular model.
Digital camera Review: Buyer beware
Summary: 1 Stars
They will tell you firmware issue is resolved but these drives have an infamously high failure rate irregardless. Lost my first drive within 8 months so it was RMA'ed and I received a 'certified repaired' piece of junk that "SMART tripped" in two months (not heat tripped though). I made the mistake of buying the cheap 1TB drive without reading reviews do yourself a favor and avoid seagate until they get there quality back in check. Don't take my word for it pretty much all hardware review sites agree 7200.11's are ticking time-bombs especially the 1TB model.