Seagate Barracuda ST3500630AS 500 GB Internal Hard Drive

Great Drive at a Great Price!

Strengths: Huge capacity; SATA-300; reasonably quiet; fast

Weakness: None yet

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...
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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.

By scott_mcclure - Jul 3, 2007

Great price on newegg.com

Strengths: The install was very painless, but i had the mounting hardware and the spare SATA cable laying around. There was no effort on my part, all i had to do was activate it in the BIOS, and windows found it and did the rest. I will be picking up another one, as

Weakness: NONE

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.

By simon788 - Dec 1, 2006

Great high-capacity drive

Strengths: High-Capacity; Seagate 5-year warranty; decent value

Weakness: Can be noisy

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...
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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!

By SDTechDeals - Jan 16, 2007

Seagate 500 gb

Strengths: Affordable, quiet

Weakness: None so far with the ones I have working

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.

By jriceter - May 23, 2007

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Strengths: 500gb, reliable after 1 day of use

Weakness: no 4 pin-molex connection for power in addition to SATA; does not have the highest gb/$ ratio relative to smaller capacity drives

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...
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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.

By Amith4dat - Dec 2, 2006