SeagateBarracuda ST1000DM003, 1TB SATA 3.5" Internal Hard Disk Drive - (6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache)

These mechanical drives are on the way out it appears. You can inject it with SATA-III technology but mechanical drives are an old technology. However they still work well enough and are pretty reliable.I'll confess that I don't know a great deal about hard drives.. but I did manage to learn a thing or two while researching the reality of SATA-III performance of mechanical drives. See, I was running my win7 computer with a Fujitsu 2.5 notebook hard drive (SATA-II 7200rpm 320GB about 3 years old) connected to my computer using an external SATA enclosure which was powered from a usb port. USB 2.0 / eSATA HDD Enclosure For 2.5" SATA Hard Drive With "One Touch Button" Instant Backup In Gold Believe it or not, it worked flawlessly and as far as I know it's the only way to run win7 from an external drive. The windows index was a 5.8. Now you'd think with all the hype of SATA-III and it's claims of 6GB data transfer rates that this Seagate would at least peform greater than a 2.5" SATA-II notebook drive that was made 3 yeasr ago. Not so. The windows index rated it as 5.9 which I hear is the fastest index rate you can get from a mechanical drive. I don't see any performance increase at all. I just have more space than the 2.5" drive. Plus the drive got returned to the netbook I took it from.Oh well.. Not a big deal. It looks to me as though mechanical hard drive technology peaked about 4 years ago or maybe even longer. They keep re-inventing SATA technology and selling it in new drives as an improvement. It's not though. In the next couple of years they will vanish entirely from the face of the earth. The good new is, the price of 128GB SSD drives is dropping daily. I see them listed now for about £80. When the time comes, I'll simply turn this into a storage drive. I do think this Seagate is still a great value and I highly recommend it. If you've built yourself an amazing killer gaming system it's going to be your bottleneck. For most people though, it will perform as expected.

Bought to upgrade a PC with an overflowing 40GB system drive C:, this 500GB drive was chosen primarily because the manufacturer (Seagate) had the wisdom to produce and provide a free utility (DiscWizard, available from Seagate's website) which makes copying an old hard drive (any make) onto a new Seagate drive virtually a one-click operation for most people by using the 'disc cloning' tool included in that utility.In the simplest mode, the tool prepares the destination disc for use, copies all existing partitions from the old drive onto the new, expanding them proportionally to fit the space available on the new drive and makes the new drive bootable. There's also a manual mode in DiscWizard which allows you to control the relative sizes of the disc partition(s) created on the new drive, so you can keep the 'recovery' partition the same size as it was and expand the C: drive to fill all the remaining space on the new drive.My supplier supplied this drive to me as a bare drive with no instructions and no connecting leads - this is normal for an 'OEM' drive which is assumed to be being purchased by someone who knows what they are doing - but again, Seagate's website has good, clear instructions describing how to temporarily install the new drive alongside the old before swapping it into position as the new main drive.I should point out that Seagate are not the only manufacturer who provide free disc cloning tools and advice for specific use with their own drives, but be aware that there are one or two who do not, so always check out the drive manufacturer's website before making a final decision about what to buy.As to the Seagate Barracuda drive itself, it is very quiet and reasonably fast - very happy with it so far.

Decent hard drive for the price and capacity. Have this running as a secondary hard drive in PC for multimedia and games storage. Had this running for over a month now and no issues, would recommend testing on arrival for a few days though (copy random files, run SMART self tests, zero fill / wipe drive) before storing any important information.Like:Speed - Transfer speeds are pretty decent, maxes out at around 110-115MB/s.Noise - I was fairly surprised at how quiet this drive is, occasionally hear it spin up every now and then but other than that whisper quiet! (PC sits on desk about 2 feet away)Dislike:Nothing so far! - I know some people dislike using Seagate HDD but I can honestly say I've never had any problem with them, have used several WD's, Toshiba, Seagate failure rate has been around the same between them all. Will update should it fail within the next 12 months.Would recommend overall