SEAGATE 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS

Well I just installed it and everything seems fine. Good price for an obscene amount of storage.One thing I didn't realize is that this is an OEM product -- that is it didn't come with any cables, mounting screws, or anything else but just the drive.This slowed me down some as I had to then go buy a power and data cable for the thing. But once I did that it installed easily enough and is working great.

The disk drive was being used in a Netgear ReadyNAS as part of a RAID set. I had to replace the disk drive 3 times until I got a drive that would pass the SMART test and not fail. Vendor was very helpful.

Seagate has always been my go-to brand for drives. A smarter friend of mine recommended them and I've been mostly successful buying only Seagate. I do have a few Western Digital drives (I always buy their externals because I'm a sucker for their design, but I've owned a few internals as well) and the Seagate drives have ultimately been more reliable.I only have three of these drives, which seems like a lot when I write it here but it isn't. I mean, you have to use more than just one of the drives to get a feel for the quality because it's not uncommon to get a dud. I have yet to get a bad Seagate drive, but I've certainly seen some unhappy first-time customers who ended up with a dud and paid the $20 for Seagate's immediate replacement plan. They always seem to think it's a rip off.Well, if I got a DOA drive I wouldn't want to pay $20 more just to have a quick replacement, but if you have a drive that dies later in its life--any time within their 5 year warranty--Seagate will replace it free of charge. If you want to pay the extra $20 to have an immediate replacement then it's a very nice option to have. If you're not backing up your computer and/or do not have any redundancy in your setup, that $20 option can make your life a lot easier if your drive dies. In my case, I used these in a Drobo so if one dies I'm okay and can wait until the replacement comes. I generally keep an extra drive around the house for when one of the drives inevitably fails.You're going to, at some point, have a drive that dies. I've been very lucky in that I've only had one hard drive die on me in my entire life (aside from a DOA Maxtor drive I got in a Lacie external Porsche drive many years ago). That one drive was a Seagate 500GB drive. It died after two years of life and was one of the seventeen 500GB drives I bought from Seagate. It was in a RAID 5 array and I just swapped it out with another--no harm done. The others are still fully functional and in, at least, their third year. While I trusted my friend, I wasn't fully sold on the Seagate brand until having such reliability proven to me through use.So far the three 1TB Seagate drives I'm using have performed very well. They're fast, they're so far reliable, and I've had no issues whatsoever with them. They work great in the Drobo (the newer model with FW800) and are safely archiving my data so the only thing I have to worry about is a natural disaster (or the unlikely occurrence that I lose two drives at the exact same time).It's a hard drive so there's only so much I can say about it. I trust Seagate to continue manufacturing quality products. My experience has been very good with them and many of their drives. These 1TB drives are doing their job very well. Seagate's had a chance to refine their 1TB model and with prices as low as they are, I think it's a good time to adopt the 1TB drive over the 500GB drive. Overall, highly recommended.

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.

I bought two of these HDDs a little less than a year ago due to its good reviews here and installed them on my Windows Home Server.However, after 10 months, one of them just bricked. I couldn't even mount it on a different computer. The BIOS wouldn't even recognize the drive.Luckily WHS did a great job replicating my data to the other HDD.After doing some research, I found out that these models have a firmware issue where the drive simply bricks itself. See article below.[...]While I'm not sure about the failure rate specified on the article above, search results indicate this to be a fairly common problem.Seagate is currently shipping me a replacement under warranty. However, under their terms, they'll be shipping a refurbished HDD and not a new one. I'll be adding this refurbished drive in my WHS, but already expecting it to brick sometime in the future.The reason for the 2 stars instead of 1, is that I like to be fair and these drive do have good performance and are fairly quiet. They do run a bit hot, but not an issue for me.