Seagate ST3750640AS-RK Barracuda 750 GB SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive | List Price: $179.99
Discount Price: $126.66
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Brand: Seagate
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 5 years warranty
Features: - 750 GB SATA NCQ internal hard drive features SATA with 3 Gbps and Native Command Queuing
- 16 MB cache buffer; 7200 RPM for fast read/write times
- Whisper-quiet with a 2.5 bels idle and 2.8 bels seek acoustics
- Includes internal drive, interface cable, serial ATA power cable, DiscWizard installation software, SeaTools diagnostic software, quick install guide, and mounting screws
- 5-year limited warranty
Unreliable, terrible tech support, ripoff return. [Posted on 2008-01-02]
I purchased 2 seagate 7200.10 drives for a large RAID array to backup my data. After about 6 months, I would hear a strange clicking sound and my mouse would lockup for a few seconds every so often. Then it got much worse and I stated getting random system crashes. I traced the clicking to one of the drives. Disconnecting the drives, the system is back to normal (less 1.5 TB of space).
This is a workstation and is only on a few hours per day. The drives are rated at 700,000 hours MTBF (79 YEARS running 24x7). I tried their seatools diagnostic tools, both dos and windoze based, and it could not even find them on an industry standard Silicon Image RAID controller on a fairly new Asus mobo. System Mechanic found errors and crashed during the diagnostics. At this point, all of the 1+ terabytes of data was gone.
Having 2 of these drives crash simultaneously should happen only every 6385 years if their reliability estimate were reliable. They had a 120 mm fan directly in front of them in a monster case with an 800W power supply so neither heat nor power would be a likely cause.
I destroyed the array in BIOS, recreated it and windows could see it. But, they started clicking continuously during the formatting and never finished.
I tried using each drive separately and neither can be seen by seatools nor formatted by windoz. I tried the drives and seatools on another test system and got the same unacceptable results.
I was on hold with tech support in India for an hour. He barely spoke English and the phone connection was so terrible, we had to spell everything out letter by letter. I told him what I had tried and that they were clicking continuously and he transferred to me the rma department.
After half an hour on hold, I had to re-read the entire back of the drive letter by letter as well as give her all of my information again. They apparently use hand written notes rather than keeping case facts in a central database. It took about half an hour. What a waste if time.
She told me it would cost me $43 for an advanced replacement or they would send replacement drives after they got mine and make me wait an extra week. When your backup array is DOA, you need replacements yesterday. Then, they want me to pay shipping on the dead drives.
The topping on the cake was their offer to charge me $7,500 per drive to recover my data. They charge less than $190 for the drive and $7,500 to read it. They should restore the data their poor quality destroys at their own expense. If their reprehensible reliability drives them out of business, they should be out of business. What a colossal ripoff!
I have ordered 2 Hitachi 1 terabyte drives to replace them. Shipping was $10.25 for both drives. I will put the refurb drives on eBay and see what I can get for them.
Deplorable reliability, dysfunctional tools, extremely slow and problematic support and a ripoff rma policy takes seagate off my approved vendor list for good!
Frustrated!! [Posted on 2008-03-07]
over 15 days to deliver ... still haven't received my drives. Amazon customer service is useless.
AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Horribly packaged by Amazon [Posted on 2008-03-27]
The drives came in a box that was barely tall enough to hold the two of them with absolutely no padding whatsoever. I realize these are retail boxes and the drives are encased in clamshells, but here I sit with a drive that most likely got tossed around by UPS, which is notorious for throwing boxes around, with no padding outside of the plastic clamshell that held it. I tested the clamshell to see how good it is at absorbing force applied to it from a flat surface and let me tell you, these things do not offer much in the form of blocking vibrations and softening blows. It will be a miracle if any of these drives work.
I specifically ordered retail kit drives from Amazon, hoping that this would offer me more protection over the OEM drives other vendors sell, with too little padding material. But Amazon made up for the fact that these actually come in black clamshells inside their box, by not padding the box that was used to ship them and by using a box that was barely large enough to hold them, offering them no protection from shipping damage, whatsoever.
This is my last electronic equipment purchase from Amazon, that's for certain!
Now, before any of you complain that this review should be of the drives themselves and not Amazon, bear in mind that in my experience most of the problems these drives encounter, both in terms of arriving DOA and early failure are due to how the drive is handled (i.e., shipped, packaged) than whether or not it is manufactured in China or Thailand. Granted, I haven't had any Thai manufactured drives fail and have had two of these fail that were made in China. However, the two that did fail were also the worst packaged OEM drives out of the ones I've put into use.
One was an early failure within the first month, that made squeeking noises right out of the packing box. It had soft bubblewrap around it, but the ends were not covered. I would not be surprised if there was shock to the drive ends in shipment.
The second drive was a DOA, it completely came out of its bubblewrap during shipping, once again, because apparently the ends were not covered and it must have been tossed enough by UPS to make it come out of the probably loose bubblewrap.
So, in my experience, it's all about how securely and safely these things are packaged in shipment. Sure, there is probably a small percentage defect rate out of the factory, but it's what happens during shipment that seems to be the real driving factor in whether these drives live out their term.
I'll be adding additional information to this review as I test the two drives I received. I have a Perl script that I wrote that puts a drive through its paces, doing both sequential reads and write across the entire surface as well as random reads/writes in a continuous fashion. This procedure is a good way to discover a bad drive early on, rather than have it fail 1-3 months down the road.
1st day report:
Miraculously, both drives have passed an initial test which performed the writing of 16MB files to a single partition spanning the entirety of each drive (i.e., a single 750GB partition), until the partition was full, followed by a sequential read of all 44,706 of those files. Additionally, I ran two sets of 250 entire file rewrites in rapid succession, with each of the 250 files randomly selected from the 44,706 written, followed by 250 random entire file reads on each drive, once again with each file randomly chosen from the 44,706, without incident. This was a random access test.
It seems that I underestimated the ability of the clamshells, in lieu of any other protection whatsoever, to protect the drives from utter destruction during shipment. I was somewhat skeptical, initially, of the clamshell's ability to shield the bare drive from vibration and shock, but apparently they are much better at reducing those elements to below the drive's critical 300 G non-operating shock limit, than I thought. I will continue testing over the course of the next week and will report back in this review.
Save yourself alot of time [Posted on 2008-04-16]
I have had two of these drives fail. Neither had more than 30 hours of use. In fact I barely had all my applications installed. What was really nice was finding out the second one failed the morning of April 15 when I was attempting to boot up and submit my tax return.
Very disappointing. They'll send me another drive but I'll not be installing my operating system or any critical files on it. Just too unreliabe. In fact I don't even know what I'm going to do with it. Seems silyy to have a back drive you have to backup onto another drive.
I don't do any gaming or use any apps that place high demand on the hard drive. In fact the computer hasn't even been plugged in for three months. I used to like Seagate but they have lost a customer for life. When two units fail like this in less than 80 hours total use I believe its a pretty good indication of how good the product is.
I should have listened to the reviewers before buying. But in the old days I had a Seagate last ten years without fail so my judgment was clouded. Clearly quality is a thing of the past with Seagate. These drives effectively wasted 30+ hours of my life.
Buy this drive if you like to talk to people in India otherwise try another vendor.
Excelent product [Posted on 2008-06-27]
This product works just as expected. Absolutely no problems so far.
I'm left with 698gb after doing an NTFS partition.
No noise, no surprises, just what I ordered
Click here for more details and discount information...
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