Seagate Desktop HDD 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 16 MB Cache 3.5"- Internal Drive Retail Kit (ST3500641AS-RK)

With multimedia devices, it's easy to use up disk space quickly. I swapped out a 3TB drive and copied everything over, and this should hold me over for a while. Since the heads need to move half as far to work with contiguous data, I expected the performance to be good, and it was. For multimedia, you don't need great speed but you do need space. This is in a media center PC with four tuners. The computer is on a network, so there might be people in several locations using this concurrently. Since the computer might be recording four shows at once, while somebody is watching another recording, and several more people are watching something over the network, that's a lot of data. If a 7GB file holds an hour of recorded TV, the computer has a full hour to read it, so the number of MB/second is still relatively small. If you are copying files across a network, you will want more speed, and if the device is heavily used, the more speed the better. I benchmarked this, and got an average read speed of 171 MB/s, with a minimum of over 100 MB/sec at the slow end. I could have done more extensive benchmarking, but for my purposes, the speed is already above and beyond what I need. I can copy a recorded TV show or movie and measure the time in seconds instead of minutes, and on a day to day basis, I have more than enough capability for now. Although the peak speed I got (a bit over 200 MB/sec at the small end) would have been considered average for an SSD, this gives far more for the money and is more than enough for its intended purpose. Five years ago, I had a total of 3TB on this computer. It has undergone many changes, including motherboard, processor, disk drives, etc. But one thing that keeps happening is that I run out of space. Fortunately, this drive is cheap enough per MB that if I do run out of room on my other drives, I can swap them out too. My other current drives are Seagate 4TB versions of this, and have been in constant daily use for a long time. They also give me good performance, and it's good to know that I'll have room to expand.

I can certainly empathize with the failed hard drive woes a number of people have experienced with this Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA Internal Hard Drive but I've had this hard drive for a year and a half and I've had no problems with it. I got it to replace the hard drive on my Dell Dimension E521 and I've been very satisfied with it. Fast and Quiet -------------- Read/Write access on this hard drive is fast. Programs load up quickly with minimal "grind" noise as the hard drive is accessed. Installation ------------ I installed this drive without a hitch on my Dell Dimension E521. "Installation" simply involves cracking open my computer case, removing the data and power cables from my old hard drive, and plugging these cables into their respective connectors on the Seagate Hard Drive. That's it. Windows (XP) recognized and formatted the hard drive with no problems. Hard Drive Capacity Discrepancies --------------------------------- When I installed XP on the new drive, Windows (XP) reports the total capacity of the hard drive in My Computer under the "Total Size" column as 465 GB. However, if you right-click on the hard drive icon and select Properties on the pop-up menu, Windows brings up a dialog box which shows the full capacity of the hard drive as 500,096,991,232 bytes (465 GB). The discrepancy between 500,096,991,232 bytes (~500 GB) and 465 GB is the result of the use of "SI Prefix" system of units and the "Binary Prefix" system of units. The "SI Prefix" system of units is based on the metric system where 1KB is 1000 bytes, 1MB is 1000,000 bytes, and 1GB is 1000,000,000 bytes - very straight forward. Thus, 500,096,991,232 bytes converted to GB by is done by: 500,096,991,232 bytes / 1000,000,000 bytes per GB = 500.096991232 GB. The "Binary Prefix" system of units is a little different. In industry speak, 1KB isn't 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes. Here's how it works: 1 KB is 2^10 = 1024 bytes 1 MB is 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes 1 GB is 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes As a result, when 500,096,991,232 bytes is converted to GB in the "Binary Prefix" system of units, the result is: 500,096,991,232 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes / GB = 465.7516174. This explains why Windows reports the capacity of the hard drive under My Computer as 465 GB, not 500 GB. --- The Seagate SATA Internal Hard Drive is fast, ultra quiet, dependable, and provides plenty of storage space. Windows (XP) recognizes and formats it with no problems. If I needed another hard drive, I would get a Seagate again!

After my WD My Book crashed with all my major files, I wanted to get a good harddrive that was reliable, fast, large capacity, quiet, and did I say reliable? I read many reviews on this Seagate 500GB Barracuda model, and decided to go with it. After getting 2 duds (OEM HD's) from another "eggcelent" online store, I basically gave up on it. I tried a 3rd time, and got it from here... and could not be happier with my choice. For the extra $10, I got a brand new, sealed haddrive with the full 5 year warranty. The harddrive itself is excellent and quite small. The SATA is super fast compared to ATA. Not only does it transfer my files in a flash, but the noise is whisper quiet. I read some reviews that this particular model is quite noisy when it writes, but I think those are just bad models, because mine is barely noticeable even when I'm transferring Gigs worth of data. I partitioned my drive in 2 parts, and have not had any problems with it thus far. If you're looking for a large storage HD with a small price, I highly recommend you go with this one. I haven't shopped much on Amazon before, but I was blown away by their service. Free super saving, which stated it would arrive in 9-15 days or something, delivered to my door in 2! I am very satisfied with the product and the service. PS. I don't work for Amazon nor am I trying to suck up to them... I was just really impressed with their speedy service.

This is specifically for the 6 TB drive. The mounting arrangement is not an issue in my enclosure so that is not a negative to me but others have complained about it so be sure and be aware of the particulars. I bought one a number of months ago and the installation was one of the easiest I have had and has worked well so I recently bought two more and installed them and all seemed OK until I started to transfer data and it was excruciatingly slow. In some cases the write rates were in the single MB/s range when I was expecting at least 100 MB/s. I did some testing with HD Tune Pro and sure enough the first drive had test transfer rates of just under 200 MB/s for blocks of over 512 byte. And as expected the reads were slightly higher than the writes. And windows routinely reported real world sustained reads and writes of 120 to 145 MB/s. On the other hand the new drives reported extremely low write rates and HD Tune Pro also showed that while the read rate were around 150 MB/s the write rates peaked around 65-128 byte blocks at below 150 then fell from there to low double digits by 8192 bytes which is probably where most large files would be. I tried switching controllers and SATA ports and the results were nearly the same. In desperation I deleted the partitions with Windows' Disk Management, rebooted and then created new partition(s) and retested with HD Tune Pro and now they all preform nearly identically. I have no idea what happened the first time because I think I created the new disks and GPT and the partitions the same way with Disk Manager but they all doing well now. If anyone has any idea about what I experienced I would appreciate a note. All and all, these are very large, reasonably priced drives for those needing more than 4 or 5 TBs and would recommend them to others but I would always pass on the story of this anomaly that I experienced.

I have purchased 4 of these and plan to purchase 4 more. I use them for a personal DLNA server, supporting videos, audio and photos. I also have 3 NAS drives that support the DLNA server as well. In relationship to the 6Tb drives compared to the 4Tb NAS drives, the speeds between the two cannot be compared. It is like flying a jet at marc 3 and going 300 miles per hour. The NAS drives stream the videos at a rate that no jitter is observed. The 6Tb drives are faster to stream videos to wireless and wired devices at our home. On top of that, the 6Tb drives also stream videos to the NAS drives on the fly to support end user ability to watch any program, video, listen to music without any hesitation, jitters, freezing or any other notifiable problems. There is just one thing that if you're running a DLNA system and it supports devices that are wireless, remember this... test your wireless network for congestion. Most of the new wireless routers these days are configured to auto adopt a popular channel. Run a test to determine whish channel is the best for your network. The issue that I was having was that when I was watching a stream video, it would jitter and freeze. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why, until I remember the days when wireless AP became a serious contender. If you have a clear channel, you'll have superb results from your DLNA. That was a bit off subject, but for the 6Tb drives, I am happy with the ones that I have and I am sure I will be happy with the ones I plan to get in the near future.

I am a techie and my entire family is made up of techies and one of my sons actually owns a technology company that specializes installing these sort of hard drives so you know I had good service. I have Win 7 64-bit. I purchased 2 units, both 3TB. One was recognized but said it was 750 GB rather than 3TB. We were able to fix that and that one is working fine showing the expected size. The other one was not possible to get to be recognized as 3TB no matter how hard we tried.. it remained 750GB. I am trying to return that one but the re-seller has yet to respond! I am also an amazon marketplace seller and I always respond to my clients' questions and notes the same day.. It has been 3 days already and pure silence. I don;t like that at all... spent this much money on a dud... I want my money back. I will update this review and change the stars once I receive the return permit at full refund from the vendor. Until then, my advice to you: buy it from someone else if you must buy this particular device! Avoid this seller--again, if they get back to me and I receive full refund, I will change the ratings! ***Update: I have received finally (after nearly 2 weeks) the return permit. I have not yet received the credit back to my account. I will update as my status gets updated. I ordered 2 of these and one is still working as expected, so once I receive my refund, I will up the stars once more! ***** update: It took almost a month but I finally received full refund on the dud hard drive. So I changed to 2* to 3* simply because I got a response of my liking albeit it did take forever and the product was a dud.

After the failure of my external backup drive that I had owned for less than a year and losing all of my documents and pictures etc, I was on the market for a more secure storage solution. Started reading up on RAID 1 and found a nice enclosure http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012R3DMM here on Amazon that would do the trick. Started looking for 1TB drives to accompany it since I needed two. (RAID ain't cheap but the security of your precious data makes it worth it)Looked at some others but ordered this Seagate drive after seeing that they had a 5 year warranty. So if one drive goes down, my data is secure and I can just go through the RMA procedure and my array is back to normal.(If you are using just a single drive no matter what brand it is always advisable to BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA to avoid costly data recovery services since no warranty will cover these costs) It's the retail kit so you get the hard drive, an installation guide, a cd including the disc wizard software which allows you to clone your current hard drive a diagnostic program and info on the drive as well as registration and data recovery, a SATA data cable and a SATA to Molex power adapter and 4 mounting screws. I paid extra for the retail kit because of the uncertainty of packaging for OEM Hard Drives. (which usually contain nothing but the drive in an anti-static bag) Packaging was secure as the drive is in a sealed anti-static bag secured on the top and bottom by two essentially plastic covers that seem to be able to protect the drive from squeezing from any side. I would have preferred foam protection. Popped it into the enclosure and connected it to my pc to begin the format(it comes unformatted). I estimate the format to take between 3-4 hours(hey it's a huge drive) and at the end you get a 931GB drive(sorry to disappoint those expecting 1000GB). Seems to be working good so far.Highly recommended!

This is my third Seagate Barracuda HD and it replaces my second Seagate Barracuda HD (300GB capacity) which replaced my first one. Each one of these drives was replaced when I upgraded my Windows OS (Windows 98 to XP and the one being reviewed today took me from XP to 7). So, each case, the drive was replaced to accommodate a clean install of new windows OS. None of these drives has ever failed or had any kind of technical problem of any kind and I've never lost data from any of the three. It is remarkable how reliable these drives are. They are also extremely quiet, this current one being the quietest of all. I simply cannot hear it run inside the tower case. I have to remove the access panel on the mini-tower and put my ear near it to hear it at all. Some people say Seagate drives are too quiet. But to me, If you've ever heard another brand hard drive clicking and humming away inside a computer case, then you'll appreciate the quietness of a Seagate. In terms of price, Seagate drives are similarly priced compared to competitors WD and Maxtor. With unmatched reliability and competitive pricing, this unit is definitely a great value. Installation was easy and the supplied mounting screws were machined perfectly to the threading on the drive ports. The drive booted up immediately with no issues and the Windows 7 OS was up and running with twenty minutes. A great value!

una muy buena relacion calidad/precio. muy satisfecho con la compra, aunq tenia recelo por los resultados anteriores de HD de la misma marca

Works great

Works great! I use it as external backup.

Die Platte an sich ist top und verdient eigentlich 5 Sterne! *Allerdings stimmen die Angaben des Verkäufers NICHT!* Ich benötige für meinen Zweit-PC, altes Mainboard und WinXP 32-bit EXPLIZIT eine 1 TB - SATA II (3 GB/s) HD, so wie hier angeboten und auch auf der Rechnung ausgewiesen! Geliefert wurde allerdings eine 1 TB - SATA III (6 GB/S) Festplatte, die ich dafür nicht nutzen kann da sie auf dem System nicht erkannt wird. *Es ist ziemlich enttäuschend, wenn man sich auf die Angaben eines Verkäufers NICHT VERLASSEN KANN!* Deshalb nur 2 Sterne!

Hey, who would not love this? 6TB in a fast, reliable drive! I have tired many HD's over the years; Seagate always comes out on top. Perfect addition to my NAS