I got a 2TB WD OEM from Newegg a couple weeks ago. The drive was in it's antistatic bag, then wrapped in two layers of bubble wrap, then paper wadding around that. Yes, i could feel it move if i shook the box hard, but not enough to cause any concern.

2TB WD Green are selling for about $120 with free shipping now. That's more bytes per dollar than the 1TB deal and certainly WAY more per SATA port and drive slot. Yes, the green drives spin slower. However, in my testing i haven't seen any significantly slower perfomance. They're still faster than i need them to be. They also run a lot cooler and that's a very important consideration when you've got a bunch of PCs with a bunch of drives stacked up in a small room.

Tigerdirect has 1TB drives for $50 USD.

j razz

Hey jrazz,

I was looking at those drives, but I read a higher percentage of failures on them, and I'm inclined to believe that the Samsung is a better buy ( which is why I bought one ).

Dave

Microcenter also has a 1.5 Barracuda for $89.
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0334261

So you think Seagate has finally regained control of their Chinese factory QA after losing it last fall?

That's not what I'm hearing.

"That's not what I'm hearing."

Dude, you have to stop listening to those voices in your head.

Oh that's where all those IT folks are who've been cursing Seagate since last fall.

Silly me.

Dave, thanks for posting about this good deal on a high performance drive

I ordered one of these and a WD1001FALS for system drive performance comparison.

(For nearline backup I use WD Green drives.)

I haven't bought a Seagate drive in about a year, I've switched to Samsung drives. I've got about 20 of them at this point and I've been pretty satisfied.

I have a bunch of Samsung Spinpoint drives bought over the last 2 years, and have also been happy with their reliability and their quietness.

Personally I like to go with drives that have 5 year warranties rather than only 3 years. That gives me hope that the drives will be better made and more reliable. I still replace them before they're 5 years old anyway just to be sure I don't see any failure problems. I've switched from Seagate to Western Digital Caviar Black.

Ok, now that I've confessed going with WD Black's I don't want to hear any comments along the lines of (use whiney voice here) "Well I bought a WD Caviar Black and it only lasted 2 weeks. It was the worst experience of my entire life!!!" Yes, there's always an exception.

While I used to feel the same way, read some of the comments on the Seagate "5 year warranty" issue for those drives. From the comments I have seen, if a drive fails, once you manage to get them to replace it, they replace it with a refurb one with a 90 day warranty on it or something along those lines (there were a bunch of comments along those lines on Newegg a while back when I was looking at new drives - the natives were NOT happy with that game).

mikey

"Well I bought a WD Caviar Black and it only lasted 2 weeks. It was the worst experience of my entire life!!!" Yes, there's always an exception.

I guess I'm one of the exceptions. I had 2 Cavier Black drives that were bad from the get go. Fortunately (or unfortunately) only one drive had data on it that I lost, the other was dead from the start. But the replacements I got have been fine for the last couple of months.

Paul

"some of the comments on the Seagate "5 year warranty" issue for those drives"

That's why I switched to the Western Digital's with the 5 yr warranties. They seem to be doing better than the Seagates based on user feedback. From what I remember Seagate used to have 5 yr warranties on pretty much all of their drives so I was buying theirs. But more recently it looks like they've gone to only 3 yr warranties for most drives.

Steve

"I had 2 Cavier Black drives that were bad from the get go."

Maybe due to rough handling during shipping? Some on this forum have warned about that possibility when buying them online and using UPS delivery. Even if a drive has bubble wrap and other padding, the movable parts inside (actuator, read/write heads, platters) can still get quite a jolt when dropped from a few feet or higher or tossed roughly into a delivery truck.

I picked up my newest drive in person from Best Buy. Their price happened to be the same as Newegg. While I've never gotten a DOA drive from Newegg it apparently has happened to others or the drives just haven't lasted very long.

Steve

Best Buy's freight handling procedures are no better than anywhere else.
Just go into a store and have a look at the stacked boxes.

Samsung's 32MB cache...very good.

OK, you guys convinced me - ordered 2 (you can never have too much disk space !! )

mikey

I've got 5 Caviar Blacks, had 1 fail and RMA'd it, had the replacement 1 week after filing the RMA. The one that failed lasted 2 years. I agree on the 5 year warranty, that plus the great reviews on Newegg is what had me choose them. I do think most drive failures early in life from Newegg is due to their terrible packaging and shipping with UPS.