Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB Hard Drive

Great Drive at a Great Price!

Posted Jul 3, 2007 - I bought this drive to go into a new PC I built recently. I've had a great experience with Seagate products over the years, and this drive is no exception. Very fast, not too noisy. I can't check the temperature on it because it doesn't have a thermal sensor, but my case has so many fans in it, there's no way cooling's an issue. My PC's been built for about a month now, and I've had no problems whatsoever with this drive. I'm thinking about getting a second one to set up a RAID 1 array for my PC.

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Great price on newegg.com

Posted Dec 1, 2006 - Keep in mind, this is OEM, you'll have to get the cables, and the mounting hardware elsewhere.This makes a great external hard drive (buy an external case) for backup.

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Great high-capacity drive

Posted Jan 16, 2007 - I got this for my Infrant Ready NAS NV+ netword hard drive. I purchased four of them for a Raid array. The drives are relatively cool in the cooled enclosure, which means that the fans doesn't have to spin full throttle. I installed the drive, they were formatted by the NAS, and they worked on the get-go. No issues. My only knock is that they can be somewhat noisy when the drives are being accessed. My main computer is comewhat quiet, and I can hear the drives chirping when backups are being performed. Not bad, it's just that they aren't whisper quiet as some drives are. You gotta love Seagate's industry "raise the bar" five-year warranty!

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Seagate 500 gb

Posted May 23, 2007 - This is a very cheap drive for its size. Hopefully that doesn't prove to be the "you get what you pay for" cliche in the future. I bought four of these to fill my Infrant ReadyNAS NV and one of them didn't work so well. I sent it back and three weeks later I got the replacement and no problems since. I guess 4-5 isn't so bad.

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Insert Title Here

Posted Dec 2, 2006 - Purchased OEM, so didn't come with mounting screws, SATA cable, or drivers. Took less than five minutes to be able to view in My Computer including downloading Seagate's program, installing, partitioning, and uninstalling program. Ran HD Tach and found this has about the same read speed as my two y/o 300 gb Maxtor, although I wasn't able to hit the 11 ms average access time claimed in the description. Is a little bit less noisy than my 74.5 gb raptor. If you're looking for .5 terrabyte+ of storage in addition to maximizing gb/$, you'd be better off going with two smaller capacity drives, unless you have only one SATA connection available. I was able to find a great 'Black Friday' deal so I went with this drive and am not disappointed. The only thing that would make this better would be 10k rpm, but it appears we're a long way off from a reasonably priced 10k rpm SATA drive with this kind of capacity.

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jriceter makes no sense

Posted Aug 2, 2007 - He's comparing 2 raid0 disks to a single non-raid disk. Does he even understand what raid 0 is? In raid 0, two drives are "striped" together to form one logical disk. For instance, raid 0'ing 2 250GB drives together result in 1 500GB drive. When writing say, 2 bytes, 1 byte is written to disk 1 and the other byte is written to disk 2. Hence, a raid 0 configuration should theoretically result in approximately twice the speed. Thus, for his configuration, I would say that other than for the lower random access time (due to the increased rpm of the raptors), the raptors are actually under performing in comparison to the single barracuda.

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Barracuda 500GB HD

Posted May 21, 2007 - Barracuda makes the best drives around without spending an obscene amount of money per gigabyte. This drives has great speed and specifications, and runs cooler then comparable drives keeping your system overall cooler and in better shape. For the price, such a drive, it’s a steal.

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NOISY!

Posted Nov 15, 2007 - This is the noisiest (non SCSI) hard drive I have owned. Reading and writing to the drive was very loud. It reminds me of my old quantum atlas scsi drive and it was 10,000rpm. This is only 7200rpm and its just as loud. I exchanged it for the Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB drive, and it is much better. It is actually whisper quiet when reading

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Seagate HDD... how can you go wrong?!!

Posted Sep 13, 2007 - Not much to say here. If you've build/ upgrade PCs, then you'll know that Seagate is the indutry leader when it comes to offering cutting edge technology for the price and also warrantying their HDDs. This one is no different, and has the perpendicular recording feature... which is supposed to write more efficiently. The 'noise' people complains about is really not bad at all.

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Seagate 500GB

Posted Jul 1, 2007 - Having used WD Raptors for several years, I added this drive to my system for my large storage needs (i.e. music, documents, backups). This freed up the Raptors for operating system and applications. So far I've been very happy. This drive is plenty fast for my needs, and is huge compared to the Raptors. It is much quieter also. It's quieter than my case fans, so I can't really even hear it. The only thing I've noticed is that it will click for a couple seconds for no apparent reason once in awhile. I've read other reviews talking about this on Seagate drives, so I guess it's no big deal. It has a SATA-II interface and 16MB cache, but the 7200RPM speed is the bottleneck here. I ran HD Tach and the numbers show that it doesn't even get close to using the bandwidth of SATA-300: Burst 129 MB/sec. Average 62 MB/sec. Random Access 13.9 sec. Compare this to my 2 WD Raptors (SATA-150) in RAID-0: Burst 228 MB/sec. Average 121 MB/sec. Random Access 8.2 sec. So it's about half the speed of the WD Raptors, but 3x the storage capacity, and 1/5th the price per GB. All in all a great value.

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