Bought two drives, one in July 08 and the second in Dec 08. Bought the second because the first had a corrupted boot sector, and now the second has the same issue less than a month after I purchased it. Tech support is shrugging their shoulders (after a 45 minute wait to speak with someone and another two hours on the phone) and Seagate's engineers deny that their software is broken even though it's a known issue on their web site forum for over a year and a half. I have now spent over two weeks of man hours trying to restore all of my data, because now the newly-minted drive is broken as well. I'm sticking with Western Digital's black series.
DO NOT BUY SEAGATE PRODUCTS! CAVEAT EMPTOR!
I replaced my internal Hard Drive about a 2 months ago since my old WD Raptor died. The drive has transformed my Dell Precision PC with dual 3ghz Xeons. It boots up faster than anything I have ever seen. And its running in SATA mode, not SATA 2! On top of it, I can't hear the drive it is so quiet. I highly recommend it.
This is how I installed a 1.5 TB Seagate hard drive:
http://ellipz.com/?p=101
Because of these problems, I would stay clear of any 11th series Seagate hard drives. This hard drive has the latest firmware.
The mother board recognizes it as 32 mb only, I am pretty much sure I paid the price for 1 TB.Tried all combinations on Bios/Motherboard/Harddisk.. doesn't work.
Planning to return this one and try Western Digital.
My mother supports SATA drives with 3 GB/s and has a working SATA Blue ray Dvd player.
DON"T Get IT
People reported there were issue's with certain models of this drive, and I checked into this as I integrated it into my system. I had a newer rev in their internal bios, than the problem models, so I had no issues. I plugged into a cheapie PCIe card I got for $15. I get same input and output rates as the older 500gb model I have, from the Barracuda family. I'm sold. These are great.
It does not matter what other product you buy. Never in 25+ years have I experienced or heard of a failure rate this high (even on a IT support desk, in the field, or in the lab).
I'll stick to Western Digital from now on!