Seagate Momentus 500 GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 16 MB Cache 2.5-Inch Internal Notebook Hard Drive - Retail Kit ST905003N3A1AS-RK

Comment: This item arrived on time. Installation was a breeze. The drive did not have the 4 screws that elevate the drive in my MacBook, allowing it to have room for air to circulate. Not a problem, as it took roughly 30 seconds to transfer the screws from my old drive. Overall, installation took maybe 15 minutes. Afterwards, I simply restored my system from a Time Machine backup. The drive functions perfectly.

Comment: Please double check what you're ordering. This item is listed as 7200 RPM, but it's actually 5400 RPM. I found this out after I ordered and received it. The customer service rep for the seller knew right away when I called that it is listed wrong. If you look in the specs, it says 5400 RPM. I haven't tried to install it yet. Evidentally after researching, there are no 2.5" hard drives with 500 GB memory at 7200 RPM. You either have to choose the higher memory or higher RPM, but you can't have both!

Comment: What's to know? Seagate is a great brand. The product is a lot of fast storage that's relatively affordable per Gig of space. It's huge! And it fits into a laptop!

I used the Seagate Drive Wizard (download from their website) to clone my 100 GB HD to this 500GB drive before swapping them in my Lenovo X60 Tablet. Worked perfectly and recognized the external USB docking station (Thermaltake BlacX (another fine product)) for the clone. The drive is fast, quite, reliable and huge. Everything a Hard Drive should be.

The drive does have a little more vibration than the factory drive. I can feel it under the palms of my hands as I type on my laptop. Flexing the case of the laptop just a little and it goes away, so maybe if I take it out and re-seat it, it may improve. But regardless, it's been very, very cool to have this much space and this speed.

Comment: My drive started to make a loud "clunk" sound about a week after I installed it. I just spoke with Seagate warranty department and they said that it would cost me $19.95 to have them ship me a new drive under warranty. The warranty rep said that neither he nor his managers have the authority to waive this fee.

It'll cost me nothing to return it to the retailer as defective, so I'll do that today instead.

Edited on 10/14/09 to add:

The replacement drive has already started to rattle and it occasionally makes a clunking sound like the first one that I returned. Based on my limited experience with this product, it seems to have a high defect rate and poor warranty service.

Comment: I am not going to say there is something wrong with these drives, because at the end of the day I'm only one guy with a bad experience. I'll just offer my review here so that people get a full perspective. I have had two of these fail on me in a row, failing offline SMART tests. When it was working, the drive was very fast and quiet, though, so I can certainly understand the high marks people give these drives when they work.

I think it is fair to say that Seagate is really running these at the ragged edge of what is possible. While the transfer rates can approach 90 Mb/s at the edge of the platter, according to a few quick tests I ran, the transfer rate fluctuates greatly, and the drive shows a pretty constant stream of software-corrected (ECC) errors. In other words, you're not losing data, but the data coming off the drive is on the border of what is readable, such that the drive needs to rely on error correction and/or rereads (hence the fluctuating speeds) to get the data off. I base these conclusions on the fact that tests of data on the inside of the platter (which has much less speed) are much more reliable (albeit slower).

If you do decide to get one of these, do yourself a favor and backup (which you should do anyways, because all hard drives are subject to fail at any time).