Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB 5900RPM SATA 3 GB/s 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive ST32000542AS-Bare Drive

Basic specs: This is a 5900 RPM drive, rated at 95MB/s max transfer rate and <16ms access (per the product manual). The power consumption is 3.0W idle and an an amazing 19dBA/20dBA noise--per the specs.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much after having disappointing (atrocious?) performance from WDC's "green" drives. As far as performance, however, I was pleasantly surprised. This drive tops out at 120MB/s--way above spec. The AVERAGE is 95 MB/s. Also, I was expecting access times (including rotational latency) to be well above 20ms. However, here again, I was pleasantly surprised with 14.7ms--way above spec.

OK, here's where I drop the bomb. I have no idea what kind of drugs Seagate was on when they came up with the acoustics. It is on their website, their datasheet, and the product manual. I have been impressed with past Seagate drives over their quietness, so I was really hoping this would be a very quiet drive at its rated 19dB which is...Read more

I have 6 2TB Seagate LP 5900 rpm drives in my readyNAS Pro, and so far so good.

Four of them I bought about a year ago (Frys). Two of them I bought on a sale from Microcenter recently.

Heat: I had a Hitachi 2TB 7200 rpm drive that was always 45 degrees when in operation. The Seagates were 39 degrees on the average.

Noise: I could hear my Hitachi clicking and trashing all the way from my living room to my dining room. Not so with my Seagates. When the plates started to spin I could hear the Hitachi do all kinds of noises as well. This was true when the Hitachi was in the NAS and when it was in it's own usb enclosure. When I removed the Hitachi from the RAID (after it failed) and added more Seagates, the noise issue was gone.

Reliability: My single Hitachi died, my 4 almost same age Seagates are cruising, now what are the chances of that happening...

In my experience, the Seagates are cool and so my NAS doesn't have to...Read more

I have had two of these drives operating continuously in a ReadyNAS storage device for the past three months and have just added a third. I have not experienced any of the failures or other problems that anybody here has described. All three disks, both the initial two and the third one that arrived more recently were well packaged in appropriate shock-insulating supports as well as in the manufacturer's anti-static foil bags. As expected, no instructions or other hardware were included which was not a problem given the intended use.

These drives are not quite as quick as faster enterprise-level drives I've used, but quite adequate for my needs especially when used in an environment where network performance is probably the bottleneck rather than drive performance. Noise was a bit greater than I might have expected and temperatures were quite good. Compared to smaller Pipeline HD drives they replaced, these are faster, cooler but significantly noisier and I would not...Read more