Seagate 1.5TB Harddrive

I was looking at this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/NewPro...82E16822148412

The one you linked is 145 plus shipping on my PC; if you are getting it for 90 plus shipping, I assume you have some special price not available to mere mortals.

The one you show has only 1 review; from just a couple of days ago.

I assume that means it is a brand new model or rarely purchased--both of which would spook me.

It may be the absolute equivalent of the one I linked to--just a retail kit. Retail kits are outsold by OEMs at Newegg, which may explain the single review.

Go to Seagate's own site and see if they are equivalent other than packaging.

It might be an "enterprise level" drive rather than a consumer drive.

Personally--without knowing more, I would avoid it for that reason alone. I can't read about its track record and don't know if it is equivalent to the one with modest reviews.

Odd, that is an atypical page for Newegg, because I didn't see any detailed specs for the drive. I wil probably order the one in question, with or without reviews and keep my fingers crossed. I noticed one of the reviews complaining about poor support at Seagate, but I have RMAed a couple of their drives without any problems.

The one you mentioned; info from seagate

ST315005N4A1AS-RK

ST315005N4A1AS-RK Barracuda 3.5-inch SATA 5900 RPM 1.5TB Hard Drive | Seagate

The one I mentioned:

ST31500541AS Barracuda LP SATA 3Gb/s 1.5TB Hard Drive | Seagate

At first glance, they may be identical?

After checking here:

Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB 5900RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Desktop Hard Drive ST315005N4A1AS-RK-Retail Kit - Compare Prices

I've had second thoughts. I guess what they say about things that seem too good to be true usually are.

Maybe a good move on your part.

FYI: The 1.5 green WD is periodically available at 99.99 free shipping in USA from Newegg. This model:

WD Caviar Green WD15EADS-00P8B0 1.5TB SATA 3.0 - OEM

has only 3 platters, a good thing. (You can tell that from the 00P8B0 suffix)

Seagate had it together 2 or 3 years ago, but may be slipping, at least with some models.

Hi there
SLOW I/O is the one thing most people seem to put up with --but is usually the SINGLEMOST CAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE.

The 5900 RPM is OK if the disk will be used for DATA / Music etc only --but I would recommend NOT putting a paging or Photoshop scratch volumes on it.

You can actully have an OS partition on it however since once W7 is loaded and the paging files initialized data reads from the actual W7 OS aren't that frequent.

So provided you DON'T put the paging or Photoshop scratch files on it it should be OK for a cheap mass storage volume.

Incidentally if you use database software such as MySQL don't put the DB index areas on this disk either (better don't put the DB on it at all) since any DB query is highly I/O bound and will result in poor performance if you have several concurrent users querying the DB.

Cheers
jimbo

ignatzatsonic said:

Maybe a good move on your part.

FYI: The 1.5 green WD is periodically available at 99.99 free shipping in USA from Newegg. This model:

WD Caviar Green WD15EADS-00P8B0 1.5TB SATA 3.0 - OEM

has only 3 platters, a good thing. (You can tell that from the 00P8B0 suffix)

Seagate had it together 2 or 3 years ago, but may be slipping, at least with some models.

Newegg and I have had a permanent parting of our ways. It wouldn't matter to me if they were giving the drives away free, I would never order it from them.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
SLOW I/O is the one thing most people seem to put up with --but is usually the SINGLEMOST CAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE.

The 5900 RPM is OK if the disk will be used for DATA / Music etc only --but I would recommend NOT putting a paging or Photoshop scratch volumes on it.

You can actully have an OS partition on it however since once W7 is loaded and the paging files initialized data reads from the actual W7 OS aren't that frequent.

So provided you DON'T put the paging or Photoshop scratch files on it it should be OK for a cheap mass storage volume.

Incidentally if you use database software such as MySQL don't put the DB index areas on this disk either (better don't put the DB on it at all) since any DB query is highly I/O bound and will result in poor performance if you have several concurrent users querying the DB.

Cheers
jimbo

It wasn't the performance of the drive that bothered me, it was the fact that every review shown on the page that I linked (post #14), spoke of mechanical failures.