Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

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This is one of the fastest hard drives around. I was surprised at how fast and quiet this hard drive is. Using one of my benchmarking tools, I get a whopping 104MB per second average data transfer rate, compared to 86MBs for my 500GB Seagate ST3500320AS drive. Unlike some of the previous 7200.11 drives like my ST3500320AS, the 7200.12 series doesn't have the deadly firmware lockout bug, so you shouldn't need to upgrade the firmware with this drive. I bought 2 of these drives 11 months ago, and I don't know how long they will last -but the same can be said for ANY hd manufacturer. I had one 320GB Hitachi SATA hd last only 13 months and it gave me NO warning and no chance to back up my data before it suddenly died. Poor product quality and longetivity can be blamed squarely on the consumers, who let hardware and software manufacturers get away with anything and everything. Especially over the last 10 years.

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So far its been working flawlessly. It was a good deal, less than 50$ for 500gb, I notice no difference in speed compared to a WB black and no difference in noise compared to a WD Green.

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No complaints. It works. Runs cool. Idles at 19°C. I have it alongside an X25-M boot drive and it works well as a storage drive. This review was modfied by poster @ 03-20-10 10:37 AM

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This is my favourite hard drive to build a new computer for friends and family members with. For about 50 bucks, you get a hard drive that's one of the fastest, quietest, coolest 3.5" HDD's. Because it's a 1-platter drive, it should also be extremely reliable. Of the 5 or so I've bought so far, none have any problems yet - a big step in the right direction for Seagate.If you can afford the cost of entry to an SSD, I prefer a small SSD as a boot drive, and a quick, well-priced mechanical Hard Drive like this one for storage of large files. You really can't beat a big, quick 500GB SATA2 drive for $50!

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I have purchased many seagate hard drives over the years and have been happy with them all. I decided to upgrade several hard drives and seagate was an obvious choice due to reliability and price. Will definately buy again. This hard drive runs very cool and is almost noise free. This review was modfied by poster @ 03-17-10 05:50 PM

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Do yourself a favor. Get a WD.No failure of any WD purchased in over 20 years. But I have to purchase 2 Seagates on sale, just to have both fail within a year. No more Seagate for me from now on.

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Got two of these one from NCIX, both drives running fast, quite and cool. Upgrade from 250GB 7200.10, runs noticeably faster and cooler.

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I recently completed a server for our organization and decided to convert from RAID 2 to RAID 10 skipping RAID 5 comnpletely.Needing 4 drives to get the capacity of one and not wanting to build an external rack, I went with the product alreading runing (RAID 2) in 2 of our other servers. I am sure that these things do fail, but we haven't seen one die yet. (Modern HDDs as in voice coil over stepper motors are not nearly as reliable. But being able to build a RAID 10 array for 1/2 the price of one drive is nice.)

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I have owned Seagate hard drives in all my desktops and laptops and none have failed in my experience

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A good, inexpensive hard drive that runs cool and quiet. I prefer Seagate drives as they have been the most reliable of all the brands I have used so far.

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After weeks of research I decided to put two of these together as a RAID 0 config. The benchmark of this drive alone was near the top of it's class, put two of them in a raid 0 and you have a screaming system. With my striped array I get 275 mb s read and nearly 200mb s write putting it squarely at high end SSD speeds for a fraction of the price. Cut my boot time down 300 percent programs install so fast you might miss it, this is a far better speed per dollar upgrade than anything I've done so far.

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Great hard drive, awesome performance with 16mb cache but I RECEIVED THE WRONG ONE!!! I got a 320GB one not a 500 but I don't feel like returning it.

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Like some other reviewers here have experienced, I ordered 3 of these for a RAID setup and once everything was installed and happy and comfortable one of the drives died. I suppose it happens, but it seems to happen a lot with this model looking at the reviews here. I was also VERY unhappy with the RMA process after having RMAed products to many other companies such as Kingston, OCZ and WD. There was no advanced RMA option if I recall (it was over a year and a half ago so I don't recall exactly but I do recall there was something that really upset me) which is completely standard with any other company. I will be steering clear of Seagate entirely going forward and sticking with WD.

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I was going to use this one for backups, but was forced to use it as primary drive. It runs very good. I am not sure what else is there to say. It works, I haven't had any issues. Runs pretty cool as well (23-25C). I am happy with it.

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Purchased for my boss' Dell computer - he has a habit of filling up drives. It's working well which is great - otherwise I may be out of a job!

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I use this for my main operating system drive in windows 7. On sale it was 48.00, can't complain about anything for this price, I plugged it in and all went well.

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I do not know what everyone is having problems with. I Have purchased seagates since I started building computers ten years ago. My seagate Ultra 160 scsi drives failed after 12 years. Since then I have used seagate sata drives and I have yet to have one complaint about any drives. Some are even 8 years old. About these drives I have been running for about a week strait now twenty four hours a day now with no problems. BUTTER TOAST

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I've been a Seagate fan over the years so I picked up one of these for a budget build for family. Works great as expected. Probably not the fastest, but I care more about reliability than anything when it comes to data, and this drive is no exception.

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Love my seagate hard drive products. crazy good quality and I've never had any of their hard drives break down. Using two in software raid stripe and getting great speeds on transfers and beats a raptor for half the price.

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When I got this drive, I was surprised to notice that it's thinner than most 3.5" hard drives that I've purchased in the past. It's a standard 500GB hard drive, with lots of storage space for a standard office machine.

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I have purchased 4 of these so far in the last year, great value, fast for the price, I have not found one faster yet (in this price range) very quiet, faster than my 32 meg cache 7200.11 500GB that had the firmware fiasco, would buy this again

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A stand alone drive buffered read was 219MB per second where my 4 disk RAID-5 setup is 517MB per second, and linear reads are almost 3 times faster than the stand alone. Index rating in that operating system this review thing won't let me mention of my RAID-5 setup is 6.3, or .4 points higher than a stand-alone drive.

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After my Hitachi drive died on me, I got this to replaced it. It's seems bit slower than the Hitachi drive. At first I was getting some loud Whiny sounds coming from it, but it seems to have disappeared. I'm not sure how reliable it's going to be down the stretch though

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Meets my needs as a simple, cool, reasonably fast basic hardrive. Use externals or file server for storage and this drive is all u really need to get a system going. Seagate has been good to me over the years and now that the firmware fiasco seems behind us, I'm OK with 500gb for 48.00 on special. Got a WD Blue, same order, very comparable on HDtach.

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Been using this for a while, and I'm very happy with my purchase. This drive is known to be one of the fastest out there (besides the Caviar Black and Samsung F3), but I can't say I can see any problems with this one. Highly recommended, especially at such an awesome price!