Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

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I bought this HD on Cyber Monday (the day in December 2008 after Black Friday). Yesterday Vista reported it has a SMART drive error and recommended to start backing-up the data. Intel Matrix Storage Control software is flashing with exclamation mark, telling me that a SMART event (error) has occurred. My media center extender keeps disconnected due to Vista modal dialog box showing the backup process. I am now filing a support ticket with seagate. The HD model is ST31500341AS firmware SD17. I should not have bought this problematic product (and not reliable!).

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2 of those in raid 0 are monstrously speedy and the capacity is awesome. Buy it or wait for more capacity, because the ssd won't have 1,5tgig yet.

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I bought two of these and they arrived with CC1G firmware. I updated them to CC1H and have had them in my Drobo 2nd gen for about a week now with no issues. Copied 450Gb on to it so far.

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Was concerned with all the press about the firmware issues - as received a CC1G firmware Thailand model. So far no issues - and its the fastest drive in my system, 103.2MB/s avg Transfer Rate (63.3 MB/s min, 129.1MB/s max), beating a Samsung 500GB and 750GB F1, and an older Maxtor 500GB. But the drive runs hotter though (10C more than the Samsungs; 5C more than the Maxtor). Keeping an eye on it - running with XP Pro w/SP3.

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At first I would not have bought the drive due to the firmware issue and people losing a lot of data on the 1TB versions of the drive.You just need to be aware of it and update  the firmware.

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I received this drive last Sunday from my Uncle in CA. First I have some problem with my 965 mobo but when I update firmware to CC1H everything is OK. Then I format in Vista and it run properly. I like it

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Drive has been in for over a week. Running great. I love it. All the drivespeedchecker speed tests I have run show it as fast as my barracuda 750gb. Very fast. I did take people's advice on this board and install the Seagate seatools (free on seagate's web site) to check the firmware. I had sd18 so I upgraded to sd1a using Seagate Firmware Upgrade Utility v4. I do not use RAID, just a home box with home video etc...

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The speed of the hard drive is ok. However, I have Windows Vista installed on this drive, it freezed the system when you booted into Windows in the first time. After reboot, the system runs fine for a while and it will freeze again. I decide to buy another hard drive and use this one as a secondary drive.

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I got my drive two days ago. After a quick check to make sure I had the latest firmware, I installed in my HTPC, did a quick format, and have had not problems. I would buy this again. Only con was that they were back ordered for a few days, which delayed shipping.

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Got the drive and was well aware of the firmware issues.. used seagate's live support.. had the fixed firmware in hand in under 5 min.. flashed it and poof all done. Working flawlessly and was an excellent buy on sale for my htpc.

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I purchased two of these drives here, and when received I just installed them into my quad4 machine and formated them and they worked just as Segate said. Fast and quiet. I can't answer as to why people have problems with this drive. I watch 1080P movies and run SQL Server 2008 on the same drive and all runs very fluently. I give these drives a 5 star rating because I am thriled that Seagate has come through with such an nice product AGAIN.. Thank you for very friendly service and super fast delivery.. GOD Bless you all Pastor John

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Got this drive before Christmas. Couldn't format the drive using Windows' administrative tool. Had to download tool from Seagate to format it. Only got a total 1.3GB. Partitioned into 3 partitions and copying between partitions is too damn slow.

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I am using this drive with XP Pro 32 bit as a non-RAIDed storage volume. Seems to ship with the latest ''J'' firmware and I have had no problems. Fairly silent, lightning fast, cheap and HUGE. Best value on the market today. A quick observation - if you want to put your OS on a 1.5 TB drive, you probably shouldn't be messing around inside your computer.

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Good drive. Got it before Christmas with the latest firmware already on it. Had some issues with partition sizing that were operating system related and not connected with the drive or firmware. Corrected that issue and now have a full 1.5 TB of storage.

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Like a lot of others have said, right out of the box it has problems formatting. Downloaded SeaTools and got it working for a couple of minutes, as soon as i tried copying data onto it, it crashed and hasnt come back. Over all very poor quality, so many of them have problems, its not just one or two.

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Thanks to the reviewer who mentioned the faulty NVIDIA on-board chipset. Initially I could only format 900 gb of the drive and gave me failing formats and bad sector errors for the remainder. After updating the NVIDIA drivers everything seems to work fine.

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Stay away from this drive. Faulty firmware causes it to freeze up for short periods which essentially makes it useless for streaming media or any similar task. Took me forever to figure out what was wrong with my system, and I have not heard back from Seagate with a new firmware or how to flash the drive on a Mac. On the plus side it is quiet and fast.

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Drive came with the already updated CC1H Firmware. I believe Seagate is shipping these with the firmware fix already because as mentioned by the previous reviewer who recieved one of these hard drives with the CC1H Firmware, it is working great. The post below me shows a link that is a month and half old.. and many updates have happened since then.... I installed this drive into a Vantec NexStar3 3.5'' Hard Drive Enclosure - SATA, USB 2.0, eSATA... Item Number: V13-3254. I formatted it by right clicking on my computer - manage - disk management. the drive was visible and took 14 hours to format!!!! It is working beautifully and alrady backed up my files. Nice 1.5TB External hard drive!!! No problems yet...

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Some of these drives ship with a faulty firmware - this is a known issue at seagate. Once you figure it out it takes about 2-3 hours to fix however it took me 3 weeks to figure it was coming from the hdd as i built a full system. You can read more about the issue here: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-barracuda-1-5TB-freezing,6582.html

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Received with firmware CC1H. They work Great.

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This drive has a firmware problem that Seagate could not fix yet and this is why it is sold cheap. Firmware versions SD15, 17 and 19 are very bad. SD1A is better. I got this drive with firmware SD17 and I upgraded it to version SD1A. With SD1A and under load it works for few hours then it freezes and brings down the OS. Contacted Seagate customer service but suffered from no response as everyone else who has this problem.

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Very good value, if it would work. Got one and formatting it would never complete, and Seagate's own tools (SeaTools) report ''test not available'' for most tests on this drive. Sent it back to Seagate and got a replacement really fast, but only to find out it fails as well: formatting finishes, but reports failure. Sad.

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The drives shipping today are coming with the new firmware. CC1H is the new firmware I just received and seagate told me that this is the fixed firmware. So far they are working nicely in my NAS box (Thecus N4100Pro) setup.

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I've used both the 1 and 1.5tb drives in a Ark Linux machine with perfect performance. There's a total of 6 SG drives in this one machine alone. High end, large capacity drives DO NOT lend themselves well to a MS OS environment in my experience (I run a small repair shop specializing in GNU Linux machines). Now, before you call me bias, how many of you were running XP or Vista? Everyone I know running any version of GNU Linux, BSD and other Open Source OSs, has reported excellent performance with these drives. There have been a few that failed, one that was dead OOTB. The drives were formatted to either vfat (freedos fat32), ext3, xfs and jfs and performed beautifully. I recommend that these drives be formatted to FAT32 rather than NTFS (which is unstable and unlikely to survive a massive crash, thus making it unlikely any data can be retrieved). The advantage of FAT32 is, its far more stable and far more likely to remain accessable in the likely event of a major crash.

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If you are reading my review, then you have probably read other reviews that totally trash this hard drive. It is apparent that this hard drive is faulty when configured with firmware versions SD15 through SD19. I suspect this is the reason why this hard drive is being sold for only $160 CDN, which isnt much more than what 1TB hard drives are being sold for. However, Seagate has an upgrade to SD1A firmware that seems to fix everything. The hard drive I received had the SD17 firmware, so I upgraded to the SD1A firmware and couldnt be happier. The hard drive has very high transfer rates and offers enormous capacity. This drive supposedly has slower access time than some other hard drives, but I have found that it is fast enough for my system. I hesitated to buy this hard drive until the upgrade to SD1A firmware came out. Now that the upgrade to SD1A firmware is available, you should not hesitate to buy this hard drive.