OEM Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST32000542AS $90 FS @Newegg

R

Redshirt #24

2[H]4U
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Jan 29, 2006
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Not my discovery (thanks, SD!), but still...$90 isn't too shabby. Though the reviews on Newegg for this particular drive are so very, very mixed-bag...actually, scratch that, what's their shipping like for bare drives these days? :(
 
any chance they would price match my order from 2 weeks ago of 2 of these drives? i paid 100 each :p
 
Interesting review to consider from newegg:
Don't know how legitimate this is, but it seems worth noting if they really did do it with 8 drives...
Pros: NONE! - I got together with friends and we each bought one drive each (8 total) when Newegg offerred a $30 coupon code discount, making the price ridiculously cheap. We had read the reviews and knew we were going to have a high failure rate during the testing phase, but we didn't realize it was going to be 100%. We were prepared to RMA a few drives, figuring it might take awhile before we had 8 good drives so that we could build a massive RAID 5 array, but when ALL the drives turned out to be defective during the individual test phase we had designed to weed out weak drives, we decided to return the drives for a refund, even though we knew we were going to get hit with a 15% restocking fee. When you add in the $9.70 Newegg charges for a pre-paid/pre-printed UPS shipping label, we wound up throwing away $25 per drive for this failed experient. I'm convinced Seagate knows the drives are bad and have somehow convinced Newegg to help them dump these drives on unsuspecting newbees.
Cons: Most users probably choose the Windows "Quick" format option and start using their drives right away. Assuming they don't already have 2TB of data they need to transfer from other drives, it may be months before they discover what we did - that ALL of these drives have severe defects in the magnetic coating on the inner two-thirds of the surface. The first third of the surface, where outer tracks are longer, and therefore have more sectors, equates to about 1TB of data. Almost all of our drives were trouble free during our fill-'em-up copy tests, but soon into the 2nd Terabyte of the copy process, we started getting severe clicking noises. The CPU work load in TaskManager would drop to near zero and the copy process would stall for 3 to 30 seconds at a time before the clicking noises would go away and the copy process would proceed. Needless to say, the few drives that managed to finish the 2TB copy test took 6 or 8 times as long to copy the 2nd TB than the first.
Other Thoughts: Here's a complete record of what happened with our 8 drives:

1 drive failed to complete the low-level format test. It took about 8 hours to get to the 41% mark, before Windows finally gave up and reported a failure.

The other 7 drives completed the low-level format with flying covers, all of them finishing in about 4 hours, so we thought we might have 7 good drives.

But then we started our copy tests - moving 2TB of video files at once, in order to completely fill up each drive. All of the drives got through the first Terabyte of the copy process with almost no trouble - maybe a quiet click from time to time, but no constant clicking, and no signs of stalling. But soon after the 1st TB, the drives began clicking and clicking more and more frequently, with longer and longer pauses, until finally the OS would freeze or crash. Only 3 drives finished the 2TB copy test, but with much clicking and stalling in the last 500-600GB, so we decided to return them ALL for a refund.
Click to expand...

Still, hopefully this will help push the price of other 2tb drives down. I'm still holding out for a decent one for under $100 shipped...
 
So tempted, but I've been burned by HDDs from newegg before and I;ve heard bad things about these drives left and right. I'll wait till I see the Hitachi 2TB drives for this price. Those have been good to me so far.
 
for those willing to risk the drive, and need one of the very BEST PSU's available, you can combo this with the Corsair 850HX plus still use the 'HARDOCP615C' promo code for the PSU

Total cost after the promo code and MIR on the PSU is $192.....


At that point you are almost getting a free 2tb drive with your MSRP 850HX
 
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