Warm: Seagate 1.5TB Retail Hard Drive 32MB Buffer for $89.99 @ Frys *EDIT* 5900 RPM

[her209]

Doesn't say whether this is the 5900 RPM ("green") one or the 7200 RPM one.
http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=32664&adid=8815765&subid=28086295&type=

External 1.5TB for $10 more
http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=32664&adid=8815765&subid=28086339&type=

 

[Cdubneeddeal]

Seems like a good deal but in my own experience, I've had two Seagate drives fail on me. One 160gb SATA one month out of warranty and my 1tb still under warranty provided a fault code with Seatools. Will be RMAing. My previous drives worked great so maybe I got some duds..

 

[MRKV]

If you go to Fry's site and punch in the product number you'll see its the 5900 RPM one. Still a good deal on 1.5TBs.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Seems like a good deal but in my own experience, I've had two Seagate drives fail on me. One 160gb SATA one month out of warranty and my 1tb still under warranty provided a fault code with Seatools. Will be RMAing. My previous drives worked great so maybe I got some duds..

Hard drives fail, there isn't a significant variance in reliability between the manufacturers (at least in my experience).

Seagate did mess up on a massive scale with their firmware glitch on the 7200.11 drives, but that has been resolved (half a year ago now at least).

Was your 160gb drive under a 5 year warranty? That's a pretty good amount of life if it failed in a little over 5 years.

 

[Basilisk]

Doesn't say whether this is the 5900 RPM ("green") one or the 7200 RPM one.
http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=32664&adid=8815765&subid=28086295&type=

The advert doesn't say, but frys.com makes it clear this inventory code is for the 5900 RPM model... which has, for me, unacceptable Customer Reviews on the Egg.

 

[dew042]

The advert doesn't say, but frys.com makes it clear this inventory code is for the 5900 RPM model... which has, for me, unacceptable Customer Reviews on the Egg.

Wow, 35% give it the lowest rating. That's not encouraging.

dew.

 

[mpheadley]

I've been seeing a lot of refurb seagate drives for sale in the past year or so. Don't know why. I'm curious also whose parts and tech were used when Maxtor and Seagate combined. Knock on wood, my 80GB and 120GB 6-7 year old editing system hard drives are still churning. I know, I know, I've gotta back them up!

 

[Acanthus]

I hear they draw 0w of power for a lot of users

 

[Emulex]

my advice for any big drive: format long, fill it a few times, run long seagate test, if passes, format long again.

after a good week burn-in you'll have a stable drive or you'll have a basket case.

applies to every high density non-raid edition drive i've had the pleasure to use.

 

[AppleHuHu]

That is a good price on 1.5TBs.

 

[Basilisk]

my advice for any big drive: format long, fill it a few times, run long seagate test, if passes, format long again.

At some point, the diminishing returns of this approach buggers my mind, BUT: always run a full-format and a full surface-scan test of new disks. A few months ago I received a new disk that was utterly dysfunctional beyond a point (only the first ~15% was usable). It's much better to know about a defect before the disk has become critical in everyday use and you have to figure out what can be salvaged and where to copy it while you await a replacement.

 

[Spikesoldier]

i got this pm'ed at another B&M store, thought i would buy some NAS upgrades.

boy was i wrong. four DOA in a row, the first three were from china and the last one was from thialand, it didnt matter as it was DOA as well.

going to try five and six today.

 

[Mitch101]

The drive is available online
http://www.frys.com/product/6002438

Basilisk link is for the OEM not the RK.

I have several Seagate 1.5tb drives. There was an early version of the drive that had a delay issue but if you flashed the drive it was fine and didnt lose data. These all should be past that.

Some motherboard and external drive enclosures have chipsets that don't read drives past 1 gig well or just dont like the drive. Ive had plenty of drives look bad but put them into another machine and never an issue with them.
Mobo's that dont like Samsung.
Mobos and External Enclosures that hate Hitachi.
Mobos that hate two Western Digitals at the same time. (TWICE I HAD THIS)
External Enclosure that didnt like anything above 1TB. (Check your chipset)
The fact is all the above drives were fine the chipset for some reason didnt work well with the drive. Luckily I own more than one machine and switching machines the drives are all still running.

Paranoia?
I also read of a number of people who returned the drive just because on power up it made a click noise and were paranoid because some reviewers are over hyping a click of death. I have two that make a click noise from time to time spin up and down. They run as close to 24x7 without being 24x7 for 12 months and 9 month not a single disc error on either. Im thinking this is overblown paranoia. Yes 1.5tb is a lot to lose.

In the end if you want to go by reviews. Samsung seems to be the winner of drive reliability over 1TB.

 

[QTPie]

My old 250GB Seagate always makes a clicky noise when spinning up for the last 2 years in my always on PC. It's still running fine.

I've had a lot of hard disk failures in the past until I replaced all el cheapo PSUs with decent Antec ones; never had any problem with HDD failure ever since.

 

[Basilisk]

The drive is available online
http://www.frys.com/product/6002438

Basilisk link is for the OEM not the RK.

In part, because I was linking to Reviews and there are 172 reviews of the OEM model and NO reviews for the RK model [at the time of posting this].

Granted, I'm perhaps naive in expecting the OEM and RK drives to be either identical, or so similar as to merit identical reviews.

And yes, I'm saddened that I passed on the recent Samsung 2TB sale ($139/) as I prefer Samsung drives for their better satisfaction ratings. Well, only another ten months until more Black Friday sales!