I purchased four of these to replace four 500gb SATA 2 drives by the same manufacturer in a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ machine. While I cannot attest to the new SATA 3 (6 gb/sec) speeds (the ReadyNAS is SATA 2), the new firmware from Netgear required me to do a factory reset on the device, and upon boot it recognized the new 4k format being used by this drive. After the drives were striped and the volume redundant, I was able to copy about a terabyte of data off my local machine in about 12 hours (with breaks in between).
The new drives run cooler than the old 500's, are amazingly quiet, and fast-- so far I'm quite impressed with their performance (especially with the 64mb cache). While I haven't seen their long-term viability yet, I'm pleasantly surprised by how well they work.
Bjorn3d has a good review of the drive here:
[...]
Recommended. Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST2000DL003
In my server, I have 6 2TB drives installed, in 3 sets of RAID 1 configuration. I wanted to replace 2 of the old drives with these ones.
I purchased and installed and immediately noticed that on Power ON, it would take few seconds for my Server to reach POST screen, which is surprising. I have 850W power supply, and 2 video cards, but still have plenty of spare power capacity left.
So I disconnected these 2 new drives, and guess what, system immediately comes to POST on power up.
I did some research and found that this model drives draws more power on start up. Once started, they behave nicely, just the initial power ON current draw is higher than other drives. Long story short, I swapped the drives from my NAS enclosure to my server and installed these 2 drives in my NAS.
PROS:
1) whopping 64MB cache....!!!!
2) Fast SATA 6Gb/s interface
3) Sustained high data transfer rate, (recreating RAID was much faster on these drives)
4) Light weight since it has only 3 platters
5) Runs cool, even with sustained data in/out operation
6) Quiet, even when transferring, reading/writing data
7) Cheap
CONS:
1) Higher start-up current draw
2) 4K sector size, which may or may not be a problem for you, depending on your application, OS etc.
3) Only 3 year warranty
My old hard drive was filled to capacity, so I had to upgrade. I decided on Seagate Barracuda Green based on the glowing reviews and great price.
Windows did not recognize the drive right away. I had to go into the computer management screen to get it to work. I downloaded a driver from the manufacturer's website, because Vista Home Premium only formatted the disk to 54% and then it hanged for hours. I think it stopped. After the driver installed, I had no troubles.
I had backed up my files from the old drive and then recovered them to this new drive. Everything works great -- and quiet, too. I don't even hear it spinning. I'm a happy camper.
I just bought this Seagate 2TB hard drive after seeing great reviews of the product. I was going to use it as a back-up drive for my computer. I bought a hard drive enclosure for it and hooked it up via eSATA. For just shy of two days, the hard drive worked great. File transfers were fast, and it sounded very quiet, much quieter than my other hard drives.
Well, by the second day, when I went to use my computer, I noticed the hard drive was making intermittent beeping sounds (in 1-second intervals). The computer no longer registered the hard drive. Other than the beeping sound, I didn't hear any disk spinning.
Because I was using an external enclosure for the drive, I tried the following to rule out reasons other than hard drive failure: (1) I disconnected the eSATA cable but kept the power supply to the enclosure going. Still beeped. (2) I installed the hard drive into a different enclosure to rule out a faulty enclosure. Still beeped. (3) I installed a different hard drive into the enclosure I used. Still beeped. (NOTE: I didn't install the hard drive in my computer because I have a slimline desktop, I had no extra hard drive bays, and swapping the existing one was too cumbersome).
I explained my methodology of testing to a Seagate Technical support rep, and he agreed that the hard drive had failed.
Anyway, I am very disappointed, obviously, since the hard drive lived long enough just for me to back up ALL my files before it died. Now I have to return it to Amazon without being able to properly wipe my drive.
I have purchased Seagate drives before without problems, and I know hard drives can fail at any time, but it's difficult to overlook the fact that it took less than 2 days for this unit to do so. It definitely makes me think twice about purchasing a Seagate drive again. On the other hand, if it didn't fail, I actually think I would have really liked this hard drive! - Low Power - Seagate'
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