Seagate Desktop 1 TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6 GB with NCQ 64 MB Cache 3.5 Inch (ST1000DX001)

Seagate Desktop 1 TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6 GB with NCQ 64 MB Cache 3.5 Inch (ST1000DX001)..

Buy Seagate Desktop 1 TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6 GB with NCQ 64 MB Cache 3.5 Inch (ST1000DX001) By Seagate

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96 of 105 people found the following review helpful.
Good compromise between speed and price.
By RJMacReady
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2Z1X7ISIZY61A I've been using an SSD as a boot drive on my Windows desktop so I can speak from experience when I say that this drive doesn't really come close to it when it comes to speed. Both are much faster than a standard drive, so the difference is only a matter of seconds, though. And the solid state drive cost nearly as much as this drive but has a fraction of the storage, only enough to hold my operating system and a few of my most frequently used programs. Everything else has to run off a second drive. This drive doesn't cost all that much more than a standard drive for the same storage, and still offers a nice boost in speed.

It works differently than a boot drive, as the computer does not recognize the solid state memory as a second drive, so you don't select which programs or files run off the drive. It only has 8GBs of solid state memory, so it couldn't even hold the operating system. Instead, the drive decides which files to store on the SSD, based on which of them are used most frequently. For that reason, the performance of the drive improves over time, as the drive learns and optimizes how it uses the limited solid state memory.

So far, I'm pleased with the drive. I really haven't noticed any differences between this one and disk based drives I've used, other than an increase in speed. It doesn't complicate things at all - the computer sees it as just another single drive. Having 2TB is nice, as I don't have to worry about space, even with a large collection of HD movies and games stored. Installing it wasn't any more difficult than other drives I've used either. If speed is your top priority, than there is no substitute for an SSD right now, but this is a nice compromise between speed and storage size at a decent price, if you're not worried about your computer taking a few more seconds to boot up.

I've included a short video so you can actually see my PC doing a complete restart. It's pretty fast, but the SSD was even faster.

45 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
What your iMac needs
By R dattan
Have a mid 2011 iMac with a 3Gbps SATA -500 GB that was running out of space. Plus was getting colored wheels more often inspite of 12GB RAM. SSD at 1TB was half the price of the iMAC which made no sense and the smaller capacity SSD's were ruled out- so this is where the Seagate SSHD 1TB comes in with the right value. The drive is pretty fast and I'm into this for a week only, hence the 4 stars. Amazon's shipping was fast, though the box was not the original Seagate one. Seems like some packaging cost was reduced. Performance wise, the machine feels like a new iMAC straight out of an Apple Store!. Getting this into an iMAC is harder than changing out an MBP HDD and also much harder than a desktop PC. But all said, it is quite doable. Here are the steps- I won't go into too much detail to keep things simple, just follow the links. There may be some differences depending on your iMAC model from 2011, but expect the basic steps to be more or less the same.
Step 1)
Move new SSHD into a USB enclosure. Use clonezilla ([...] to do a disk to disk back up.

Step 2)
As a clone, the new SSHD disk is partitioned exactly like the old disk- which means 500GB is left out- Use Disk Utility to expand the SSHD into 1TB.

Step 3)
Follow this Youtube link to see how to add a new disk to the iMac. You will need the suction for the glass( I used 2 old car GPS holder suction cups to do the job) and Torx T8 drivers ( Home Depot or Lowes). You need to stop at the part where the display and cables come off fully- everything that follows is not required if you are simply swapping out your current disk with a new SSHD
[...]

Step 4)
In the top- middle section you will find the HDD attached with 2 screws. Take off those screws and the 2 cables that connect the HDD. At the bottom, you will find 2 screws sticking out -these are used to hold the HDD to the frame- Use the Torx driver to take them off. Put them back on into the new SSHD. Plug the cables into the new SSHD and put the 2 screws back on

Step 5)
Reverse all the steps, starting with each of the cable connectors as showed in the video. Once everything is back on, power up the iMAC

Step 6)
Depending on your model, you may run into an issue, where the thermal sensor for the HDD may not be detected- this results in the fan running off course and eventually going for full speed ( normal is 1100 rpm- full - 6000 rpm+). This is loud enough and if left running may meltdown the HDD fan. This problem could be fixed with Apple's SMC reset procedure ([...] Use SMC fan control freeware to check fan speeds ([...]

Step 7)
After following Apple's process, if you still observe high fan speeds buy the HDD Fan control app to fix the problem ( there is a 1 hr fully functioning demo, so that you can see it working ([...] At $35 it is a bit pricey but worth it- set it to startup at login, and set it to start in every user's login and you are good to go.

That's it. Seagate drives are generally good and I think this guy will last. I have a momentus 750G SSHD running on the MBP for the last 1 year with no issues. Anyways no more colored wheels spinning and that makes a huge difference

Nov 13th- Update
-------------------------------------------
- Well over a month now- Drive runs well and is quiet -raising my 4 to 5 stars

33 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
Decent upgrade from 3 year old Barracuda 7200.11
By Timothy D. Williams
I purchased this drive after having great experience with the Momentus XT 500GB (first-gen) notebook SSHD over the last two years. The drive made a great improvement in boot, hibernation and application performance in my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e when an SSD at 500GB capacity would have cost nearly 10x as much as the 500GB SSHD in 2011. I decided to "preorder" this drive over a month ago and it arrived exactly when Amazon promised (late September.)

Upon opening the drive, it looks like a normal hard drive. I mounted it below my original drive that would eventually be pulled, and temporarily plugged it in to the SATA and power cable that my DVD-ROM drive was connected too. I decided to load Seagate's free data migration software (Acronis) which is used by many other OEM's such as Intel for their SSD's. Acronis software has always worked great for me in the past as isn't based on Linux (it appears to be Windows PE) like many "cheaper" migration tools that are often unable to copy Windows GPT partitions or hidden recovery partitions. Acronis data migration in my experience also supports most USB 3.0 and eSATA controllers if you are using an external means to migrate data (such as in a laptop.) I tested it's compatibility with my Texas Instruments USB 3.0 controller and my Marvell eSATA controller and both detected properly, enabling faster copying than over USB 2.0 in a laptop. In short, Seagate's migration software is excellent.

The migration of 1TB data took about 2.5 hours using internal SATA 3Gbps. After it was finished, I disconnected the old drive, connected the SSHD, and plugged my my optical drive back in.

Windows booted and everything looked fine. Performance wasn't much faster at first, but over the course of a few days there have been noticeable improvements booting Windows, loading iTunes and Chrome, and especially switching user accounts. The performance isn't dramatic, but it's there. Windows 7 performance index went from 5.9 to 7.4. This is an Intel x58 motherboard with a 3Gbps (SATA 2.0, 300MB/sec) controller. Newer systems may have a higher rating, but from what I've read, the single 8GB NAND chip on the Seagate SSHD's is only 2-channel so it's limited to around 190MB/sec. The goal is to offer improved random access performance like an SSD, which it does.

Regarding the "product review" I've been running the drive exactly one week pretty heavily with no issues, so at least my model doesn't appear to be defective. Packaging for shipment was excellent; it arrived in a real hard drive carrier with plastic cradles at each end. SMART diagnostics tools has found no problems. Drive had 2 spin ups and 1 hours of use (all presumably factory final testing.)

Hope this review helps with your decision. It's unfortunate they don't make a 3TB and 4TB model.

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WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX

WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX..

Special Price WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX By Western Digital

Most helpful customer reviews

1001 of 1090 people found the following review helpful.
Regular consumer drives in RAID are accident waiting to happen
By Gary E. Peterson
Here is a quote from a review at pcper.com

I'm going to let the cat out of the bag right here and now. Everyone's home RAID is likely an accident waiting to happen. If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail. I'm guilty of operating under this same false hope - I have an 8-drive array of 3TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID-5. For those uninitiated, RAID-5 is where one drive worth of capacity is volunteered for use as parity data, which is distributed amongst all drives in the array. This trick allows for no data loss in the case where a single drive fails. The RAID controller can simply figure out the missing data by running the extra parity through the same formula that created it. This is called redundancy, but I propose that it's not.

Since I'm also guilty here with my huge array of Caviar Greens, let me also say that every few weeks I have a batch job that reads *all* data from that array. Why on earth would I need to occasionally and repeatedly read 21TB of data from something that should already be super reliable? Here's the failure scenario for what might happen to me if I didn't:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has a bad sector that cropped up a few months back. This has gone unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Since drive 1 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 1 and marks it offline.
* Array is now in degraded status with drive 1 marked as failed.
* User replaces drive 1. RAID controller initiates rebuild using parity data from the other drives.
* During rebuild, RAID controller encounters the bad sector on drive 3.
* Since drive 3 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 3 and marks it offline.
* Rebuild fails.

At this point the way forward varies from controller to controller, but the long and short of it is that the data is at extreme risk of loss. There are ways to get it all back (most likely without that one bad sector on drive 3), but none of them are particularly easy. Now you may be asking yourself how enterprises run huge RAIDs and don't see this sort of problem? The answer is Time Limited Error Recovery - where the hard drive assumes it is part of an array, assumes there is redundancy, and is not afraid to quickly tell the host controller that it just can't complete the current I/O request.

Here's how that scenario would have played out if the drives implemented some form of TLER:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has developed a bad sector several weeks ago. This went unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Drive 1 makes a few read attempts and then reports a CRC error to the RAID controller.
* The RAID controller maps out the bad sector, locating it elsewhere on the drive. The missing sector is rebuilt using parity data from the other drives in the array.
*Array continues normal operation, with the error added to its event log.

The above scenario is what would play out with an Areca RAID controller (I've verified this personally). Other controllers may behave differently. A controller unable to do a bad sector remap might have just marked drive 1 as bad, but the key is that the rebuild would be much less likely to fail as drive 3 would not drop completely offline once the controller ran into the additional bad sector. The moral of this story is that typical consumer grade drives have data error timeouts that are far longer than the drive offline timeout of typical RAID controllers, and without some form of TLER, two bad sectors (totaling 1024 bytes) is all that's required to put multiple terabytes of data in grave danger.

The Solution:
The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives.

End quote and back to reviewer.
I've got 5 of these in a Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+). It is really a sweet setup.

The Synology software has a S.M.A.R.T. test that can do surface scans to detect bad sectors. I have their Quick Test check every disk daily and the Extended Test set to automatically run on each of the 5 disks every weekend. (The Extended Test takes about 5 hours per disk so I separate the tests by 12 hours.)

96 of 104 people found the following review helpful.
Nice hard drives for NAS or storage server with RAID.
By T. Mccleary
If you're looking at this review, you're probably in the market for some honkin' big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital "Red" series drives are probably a total waste of money if you're planning to put them into a regular PC. If you're not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If you're looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They aren't the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives.

For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon.

The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment.

The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which 'clunked' when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so there's a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT!

Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... I'm running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. That's a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array.

On to the bad stuff...
One of the drives (I haven't checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks?

Warning/Advice about Data Storage:
Note 1: If you're going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesn't vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures don't happen all at the same time).
Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, I'll backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you don't have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data.

I'm giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! I'll update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it ain't looking too good for drive DA5!

139 of 160 people found the following review helpful.
NAS Best Friend
By Simon
After about six months of searching for the perfect drive, I finally settled on two of these Western Digital Red 2TB WD20EFRX hard drives. I was ready to purchase HGST enterprise drives, the former Hitachi, but WD came out with these drives just in-time. I wanted to get the 3TB WD30EFRX version for my Synology DS212 NAS, but the price difference didn't make that much of a sense, and 2TB drives are more than enough for a few years of my home office use. I am very happy that these drives MTBFs are rated at 1,000,000 hours, they use less power, and they are cheaper than other enterprise drives.

Upon receiving, I immediately installed them in my NAS. It took about 15 minutes to install DSM 4 and begin the inspection process. I neither chose Raid 1, JBOD, or SHR, and I took some online advice and created two separate volumes, one on each disk, to have two independent file systems. In this case, you don't have to worry about rebuilding disk arrays if any drives fail, and you always have a backup present. I was planning on using Folder Sync feature to sync all folders from Disk 1 to Disk 2 every other hour, but I found out this feature only works on two independent Synology Disk Stations; however, you can use automated backup feature to backup data from Disk 1 into Disk 2, and it produces about the same result as Folder Sync does, and it gives you a few more options for backing up system and application files as well.

Synology volume creation took about 7 hours for each drive with automatic bad sector reallocation feature. I later tested each drive with S.M.A.R.T extended test--each took about 4 hours--and I am happy to report that I did not have any bad sectors on either of the drives. That is, the "Reallocated Sector Count" reads zero in S.M.A.R.T report.

The drives are surprisingly quiet. I had an enterprise RE2 500GB in my NAS, and it was thunderstorm loud compared to these. The temperature is also very reasonable. When the drive is resting it is about 31C/88F, and under heavy usage it rises up to 35C/95F. Although these drives speed are only 5000 rpm, I don't see any difference in file transfer speed. The only downside that I could sense was the startup time from sleep. I feel that compared to my old WD RE2 drive, it takes a good 2 to 5 seconds more for the NAS to come out of sleep each time. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider when you invest in these drives.

I think WD has done a good job with these drives, and they are currently the best on the market for home or home office use. That being said, I still think WD RE4 drives are the best enterprise drives and ultimate in performance; however, if you are looking for a good set of drives for your NAS, and the power consumption and noise are important to you, these WD Red drives will work just fine. Compared to desktop drives, these come with a few enterprise features that come in handy and will save you some time and money down the road.

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