Seagate 1TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Drive Retail Kit

With multimedia devices, it's easy to use up disk space quickly. I swapped out a 3TB drive and copied everything over, and this should hold me over for a while. Since the heads need to move half as far to work with contiguous data, I expected the performance to be good, and it was.For multimedia, you don't need great speed but you do need space. This is in a media center PC with four tuners. The computer is on a network, so there might be people in several locations using this concurrently. Since the computer might be recording four shows at once, while somebody is watching another recording, and several more people are watching something over the network, that's a lot of data. If a 7GB file holds an hour of recorded TV, the computer has a full hour to read it, so the number of MB/second is still relatively small. If you are copying files across a network, you will want more speed, and if the device is heavily used, the more speed the better.I benchmarked this, and got an average read speed of 171 MB/s, with a minimum of over 100 MB/sec at the slow end. I could have done more extensive benchmarking, but for my purposes, the speed is already above and beyond what I need. I can copy a recorded TV show or movie and measure the time in seconds instead of minutes, and on a day to day basis, I have more than enough capability for now. Although the peak speed I got (a bit over 200 MB/sec at the small end) would have been considered average for an SSD, this gives far more for the money and is more than enough for its intended purpose.Five years ago, I had a total of 3TB on this computer. It has undergone many changes, including motherboard, processor, disk drives, etc. But one thing that keeps happening is that I run out of space. Fortunately, this drive is cheap enough per MB that if I do run out of room on my other drives, I can swap them out too. My other current drives are Seagate 4TB versions of this, and have been in constant daily use for a long time. They also give me good performance, and it's good to know that I'll have room to expand.

I can certainly empathize with the failed hard drive woes a number of people have experienced with this Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA Internal Hard Drive but I've had this hard drive for a year and a half and I've had no problems with it. I got it to replace the hard drive on my Dell Dimension E521 and I've been very satisfied with it.Fast and Quiet--------------Read/Write access on this hard drive is fast. Programs load up quickly with minimal "grind" noise as the hard drive is accessed.Installation------------I installed this drive without a hitch on my Dell Dimension E521. "Installation" simply involves cracking open my computer case, removing the data and power cables from my old hard drive, and plugging these cables into their respective connectors on the Seagate Hard Drive. That's it. Windows (XP) recognized and formatted the hard drive with no problems.Hard Drive Capacity Discrepancies---------------------------------When I installed XP on the new drive, Windows (XP) reports the total capacity of the hard drive in My Computer under the "Total Size" column as 465 GB. However, if you right-click on the hard drive icon and select Properties on the pop-up menu, Windows brings up a dialog box which shows the full capacity of the hard drive as 500,096,991,232 bytes (465 GB).The discrepancy between 500,096,991,232 bytes (~500 GB) and 465 GB is the result of the use of "SI Prefix" system of units and the "Binary Prefix" system of units.The "SI Prefix" system of units is based on the metric system where 1KB is 1000 bytes, 1MB is 1000,000 bytes, and 1GB is 1000,000,000 bytes - very straight forward. Thus, 500,096,991,232 bytes converted to GB by is done by: 500,096,991,232 bytes / 1000,000,000 bytes per GB = 500.096991232 GB.The "Binary Prefix" system of units is a little different. In industry speak, 1KB isn't 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes. Here's how it works:1 KB is 2^10 = 1024 bytes1 MB is 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes1 GB is 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytesAs a result, when 500,096,991,232 bytes is converted to GB in the "Binary Prefix" system of units, the result is: 500,096,991,232 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes / GB = 465.7516174.This explains why Windows reports the capacity of the hard drive under My Computer as 465 GB, not 500 GB.---The Seagate SATA Internal Hard Drive is fast, ultra quiet, dependable, and provides plenty of storage space. Windows (XP) recognizes and formats it with no problems. If I needed another hard drive, I would get a Seagate again!

I bought it to replace smaller drives. So far it works well - fast and quiet.Beware of the following problems:1) 1.5 TB generation of 5900 rpm drives could not sit next to 7200 rpm drives in the same cage - the foreign frequency of vibration was knocking the heads off tracks and caused tracking errors. I don't know if this problem is solved in 4TB generation; I don't have 7200 rpm drives anymore.2) Use the SATA cables supplied with the kit. I had other (longer) cables, and the drive was not reliably detected by the SATA controller, until I replaced them with the ones from the kit. Those older cables might have been good only for 3Gbit/s rate of older SATA.3) some BIOSes might have problems detecting large drives. I have Intel DH55HC system board and the not-so-recent BIOS worked (after I switched to better SATA cables, that is). Remember that if you want to use such large drive for your OS, you need to switch the BIOS to UEFI boot. If it's for data, though, you don't have to.