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.

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.

Worked flawlessly for the first few weeks then noticed lately it will make a chirp noise intermittenly. I have rummaged all over the Internet and have found others have had the same issue. Some said it was resolved with a firmware upgrade but apparently, depending on which plant your Hard drive was built at, the newest firmware will not apply to it. The chirping has stopped for the past couple days so I will keep monitoring it to see if anything changes. I have gone through several S.M.A.R.T test with several diagnostic tools and all passed with flying colors so it doesn't seem to be a failing drive. I have noticed a slight latency when the drive does chirp during file decompression and file transfers but none during video viewing although that might be contributed due to the buffering of the video.

Well, I purchased this for my HP Media Vault NAS device (which I love, and is the subject of a separate review), as one of the only drawbacks of the Media Vault design is that it has no redundacy. Doing a search for the best price / performance ratio, I selected the Seagate Barracuda drive. Also, as a note to potential purchasers of a second drive for the Media Vault, there are a number of drives that it will not work with. Since there are no incompatibilites with the Seagate drives (seems to be mostly Western Digital drives that won't work), that also helped me pick this model. It works fine with the MV. You can choose to install it as an additional 500 GB of storage, for a total of 1 TB, or add it as a mirror as I did, giving you a total of 500 GB of redundant storage. Now I finally have the peace of mind to fill this sucker up and not worry that I'm going to lose my entire digital life in one hard drive crash. The odds are very low that both drives will fail at the same time. Also, and I didn't know this at the time of purchase, but this is the exact model that already shipped with my MV, so I now have a mirror of two of the exact model drive. Cool! If HP likes it, then it's good enough for me.

Works great

Have had two of these drives in one of my computers over the past month, and there's been no issues. They installed without a hitch, are very quiet, and do the job. Will update this review if, at any point, they fail. A sample size of two is still very small, but I've had good luck with Seagate drives in the past and I'm hoping that these 4TB drives will last for a long, long time, too.

Es un exelente disco rapido silencioso y de gran capacidad ejecuta los juegos rapidamente y el software si ya cuentas con un SSD te recomiendo armar tu pc con este y sacar los HDD que aun manejes la mejoria es super notoria al copiar y ejecutar programas !

Rapide et silencieux

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