Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS

I bought 4 of these for a RAID5 setup in September. So far I've had two of them fail. One was a hard failure in which the controller stopped working completely, and the other is showing a lots of seek errors in the SMART data and tells me its going to fail soon. They both started clicking the heads (a symptom of a reset because of an error) just a few days after I got them.

Seagate replaced the total failure within a couple of days after I reported it, and now I have to ship them back the failed drive. I bought a new unit I'm expecting tomorrow as a spare replacement, and I will be reporting and shipping back the drive with all the seek errors soon.

The drives have otherwise been great, but 50% isn't such a good reliability statistic, and that's my primary measure for a drive.

On the other hand, I did buy two other drives from the same family, two ST3500320AS drives. They have been working away flawlessly in my workstation in a RAID1 setup...Read more

This is an OEM drive as several reviewers have noted, but this should be expected of any drives sold by Amazon unless the retail box is shown in the product description. This should not be a problem for most people since most motherboards come with extra SATA cables and most power supplies now have SATA these days, but if you need these items along with mounting screws opt for only drives sold in retail packaging. Now, about the drive. The drive is very quiet and works well once you get a good one. I had to reurn as many as I kept to get good drives. I think the reason is due to the poor packaging that others have noted. Drives that arrived in good working order were in sealed anti-static packaging with the black plastic end caps supporting the drives. The ones that were problematic were in anti-static bags but arrived only wrapped in one layer of bubble wrap or in syrofoam. One arrived in a plastic snap-around holder which was not even sealed. This was totally unacceptable...Read more

This is a OEM drive so that it all you get no screws or SATA cable so have them on hand. Also Register your drive Before you install you need the serial # off the drive to do so for your 5 year warranty. Good Value for the price per GB. Great Drive for back-ups