Let's take a look at the latest 3 TB hard drive from Seagate, the Barracuda 3 TB, and see how it performs when we put it through its paces.

Platter density has been the crutch of hard drive makers in recent history. Increasing spindle speeds can reduce random access latency, but at the expense of cost and thermals. Improvements in random access performance via increasing spindle speed pale in comparison to what is possible with solid...

Not much more to say. It wasn't DOA, and it's been working fine for about a month now. HDs are basically a commodity now, not a huge difference between brands. If you care about your data, RAID your drives and make regular backups.

-Good value ($/GB; -Performance as expected

-A little loud..; like most 7200RPM drives

- Would highly recommend checking your Event Viewer for System errors. Filter on Event ID = 7. - Do NOT back all your important data onto this drive unless you have a mirror array or ANOTHER backup!

- Big drive; cheap under $100

- Had to use SeaTools to initialize drive (a sign it was a bad drive) - Started getting "Bad Block" errors 7 days after light use - Errors progressively got worse

This is excellent. It is just what I hope for, and it works extremely well. I have it on a very fast external connector hooked to my Mac Pro, and I use it to backup files when I want to reduce my storage.

Thankfully I bought the 3TB version of this drive as a storage drive for misc stuff that's already backed up on externals. It runs like a tortoise and write speeds are just insulting. Shoulda learned to stay away from this company after my Free Agent died years ago and nearly lost me all of my data.

Bought two of these for my NAS. They arrived in a timely manor and work great. These are bare, unformatted drives and don't come with hardware, but if you're looking for a solid drive and a good value, theses should certainly fit the bill. Very pleased.

I have 4 of them spinning 24/7 in my server in RAID 10 since November last year and they have been rock solid. I also have 4 * 2TB Seagate drive and same thing, no problems. Seagate released these drives before they released their NAS compatible drives in order to compete with WD Red drives but...

Lot of space (2.7TB after format!); speedy (7200rpm); SATA III; upgradable firmware; good balance of speed/latency; perfect for server (RAID) or desktop application; run cool

MTBF is lower than most Enterprise class drive or NAS drive; warranty is 2 years

I bought two of these a couple of years back to use in a mirrored configuration. Both failed, one within a year and the second within two years, just now at time of review. Fortunately I was able to replace the first immediately to restore the mirror and also kept other backups...

The price was right and it works great. I copied 1.5TB between this drive and a comparable Seagate 3TB model. I reached continous write speeds of up tp 200MBs. By the time the drive was half full, the speed was down to 150-160 continous.

None so far