Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA 3.5" Internal Bare Drive with 7200 RPM & 64MB Cache

This hard drive works like a champ with my setup. NO glitches. It's a BARE drive so no manual, no screws for install and no software. Really, all you need are screws or a screwless bay. So save the money and get a bare drive and download whatever drivers or Seagate software you need before installing. This starts up anyway using Win 7 drivers. To Partition and Format the drive: Use Windows 7 Control Panel > Administration > Computer Management > Disk Management Utility to Partition and Format as you want. Instructions for partitioning/formatting are all over the web, but I use the ones from Windows Knowledge base on the Microsoft Website. Very clear. Also -- using the cache for performance settings.At the recommendation of others, I did a full format (vs quick format) after partitioning - no errors / bad sectors on any of the drives. This takes a LOT longer with 1TB and 2TB drives than the quick format option, but it thoroughly checks the drives so you know what you've got (or not got) up front. Figure a couple hours for 2TB drives or thereabouts.Before purchasing any of the Hard Drives for my new build, I thoroughly read all the reviews. This is the third of 3 Seagate 3.5" Bare Drives I've installed in my HAF X case. The Other Two are Seagate Barracuda "XT's" -- 2TB. All work great. While I "wanted" solid state drives, they are not practical from a cost standpoint for me because I do Video Editing and need so much hard drive space. Even 3TB isn't near enough yet. I decided to stick with one vendor -- and it was Seagate vs Western Digital for the internal hard drives for performance and reliability reasons, and because of the warranty periods. I've had both types of internal drives in the past. Only the Western Digital gave out, but that was also after a long time and heavy use. Not intended as a slam. Both brands are probably fine. Still the Barracuda XT's especially outperform the WD Caviar Blacks for the type of programs I run.I have installed and briefly read through all the Seagate software, but have taken it (and all other bloatware & unnecessary starup files) out of my startup sequence, which makes for very fast POST and Windows bootup of ~ 8 seconds on my Asus P8Z68-VPRO/Gen 3 motherboard/I72600K CPU. (That boot time is off the Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT boot drive with 64MB cache with NO overclocking.) Still, may use re-enable Seagate Tools software for backups vs Win7 and some of the other features that software offers. Very pleased so far with performance, speed, temps of these drives, and they are NOT noisy at all. In fact, very quiet.Last -- this 1TB drive is for a 6.0Gb/s SATA port, but just FYI -- it's backwards compatible with 3.0 Gb/s SATA ports and cables. I installed this drive on a 3.0 Gb/s SATA port using a 6.0Gb/s cable (only kind of SATA data cable I purchased) and it works just fine. That 3.0 Gb/s SATA "port speed" is really faster anyway than what any spinning hard drive can accomplish anyway and I've already used my two Z68 6.0 Gb/s SATA ports for the 2TB Barracuda XT's. Avoided using the Marvel 6.0 Gb/s controller SATA ports on the Mobo. Using the Z68 SATA ports instead -- too many people having problems with using both controllers at the same time, especially if they have a RAID setup (I don't). 3.0Gb/s connection is fast enough for now but by purchasing the 6.0Gb/s drives, may have some future capability compatibility at a minimum markup now.

I bought six of these drives in 2014 to build two systems running RAID 5 on the motherboard. The RAID system runs Intel Rapid Storage Technology. I have had no problems, issues, or known defects. I check the status of my drives once a month. These drives haven't had problems. Both systems are performing well.My wife and I are hard core technologists (combined 45 years) that have a healthy respect for failure rates, impending doom, and we implement cross redundant network backups. It's kind of like buying auto insurance for the accident you hope you never have. Still we do this as a policy.She lost a 2TB drive (not this Seagate drive) in a single point of failure setup. It cost us about $1700 to recover in a clean room environment. We thought we'd covered our backsides, but I guess not. Remember to read the reviews to see what others have uncovered on used drives, sold as new, or, mislabeled drives. Don't be afraid to chat with their tech support or return department. They'll probably be able to tell you more about the reliability of models they sell than anyone else. The sales folks are going to try to, well, sell you on what they have. I'm not saying they'd lie, but you may not get the whole truth.I have towers that have an abundance of air flow. Water coolers on the CPU's and motherboard apps that monitor temps. I clean filters about every 6 months. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

It came with paperwork showing it was tested. Plugged in. Went to device manager storage and formatted it. Making a new simple drive and it works fine. Downloading games to it now.

As hard drives grow larger and larger, the one fear I always have is reliability. It was one thing to lose a few hundred gigabytes of information, but something entirely different when you lose a terabyte of photos, movies, games, and other information important to your spouse (hint, hint). I am happy to report that Seagate makes a quality product that has not had any issues since first purchased and installed in our system. Of course, this does not alleviate my need to backup my data on an external system (bigger hint), but I am not concerned that my day-to-day operations will be lost because of faulty technology.A few years back, the hard drive industry was in a race for speed (reported in rotations per minute - RPMs) and size (reported in bytes - MB, GB, TB, etc). While this led to some amazing advertising claims, we really never saw the type of increases that have come recently. Since the first SSD (solid-state drive) was introduced, manufacturers have finally divided their focus - to our benefit. Higher capacities (which do not require amazing speed to read/write) are becoming cheaper and cheaper to acquire in HDDs - while faster loads of the operating system (O/S) and software are being offered by SSDs. Unless your computer is space limited, it is advisable to have both - some things are not better when mixed together.Overall, if you're looking for an affordable high capacity hard drive, then Seagate fits the bill. It is outfitted with a 6Gb/s connector (which, if supported by your motherboard, is adequate for data transfer) and 64MB of on-drive cache - allowing the drive to better handle data transfers, as it spins and finds the data to feed to the system. I have a large collection of movies, games, and photos and still have plenty of room on this drive. I keep my O/S and other software on my SSD - so if/when I decide to finally upgrade from 1TB to the next, bigger drive - I can simply copy the data from this one to the new one - without any other issues. But always remember - as noted before - make off-machine backups of your important data.