Out of the six 500 GB drives I ordered as new, when I put them in my servers 3 of them came up as unallocated disk space and did not to be initialized. This told me they were used. The other 3 seemed to be new and were asking to be initialized properly.

Great way to add a hard disk. I really like this product.

Very good 7200 drive that is extremely fast! Avg transfer rate is at 100mb / s It stays 42c in a small mini-ITX chassis. Followed with an acer Vertion X2610G http://www.2shared.com/photo/Lv07lBwY/HDTune_Benchmark_ST500DM002-1B.html Given the prices in the segment so it is too expensive in comparison...

Seagate Barracuda SATA 500GB HDD haves most reliable and proven perpendicular magnetic recording technology hard disk can be used in any desktop.

The only way I can fault the barracuda is noise levels, when you're booting something up on this drive the moving mechanical parts will create noise. Maybe more so than it's rivals, but the great thing is, it is an affordable 7200 RPM HDD that is reliable.

One thing i could not get the warranty for the procuct i purchased. When i entered the product details in the seagate website to the check the warranty period it was not showing any details in the warranty period. But when i purchased it was shown as 2 years warranty.

I bought 5 of these about a year and a half ago befor the hhd market went crazy. Got them for 40$ a peice on sale. 1 was doa but the other 4 have run flawlessly. I have 3 in raid0 and the other one by its self in another build.Great price for the performace at the time i bought.

Cheap at the time

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I don't think I'd buy a refurb to use as a primary but it's working fine as B/U.

Installed in a few minutes, partitioned, formatted and backed up my system SSD to it; Do the back up once a week and it works like a charm; Granted I don't use it as a primary but I took that into consideration when I purchased it.; Guess I'm just lucky based on the other 2 folks

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This is a great drive to use for system boot drive. Seems responsive and quicker than most other 7.2K drives

Fast & quiet

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Nice and quite, really fast with Windows 8 installed on it.