Centrecom's Dusk Till Dawn Promotion - ends 7 AM tomorrow 10/10.
Cheaper than the cheapest internal 3TB on staticice ($129), even including shipping. Pretty decent for extra space to store all your growing por-, er, pira-, er…digital media library.
$119 + $6.95 shipping = $125.95. Shipping cost is the same for Tasmania and Perth, and Wagga Wagga as well, so I guess regional shipping too.
don't lol windows7 - you're one of the operating systems that have to run these things.
Will this work in n40l?
I've also used the 4tb in the N36L, works well. I have quite a few of these in N36L's too, just make sure your OS can handle drives of that size (XP needs special drivers and you can't boot the OS from anything larger than a 2tb drive).
I ordered two on Monday, was delivered today by auspost, one has over 6000 relocated sectors during formatting.. Called to speak to their tech, told him issue, was told to send it back. Shall see what their RMA process is like….
My recommendation - always do a full format of your drive, then run something like crystaldiskinfo to see the Smart Data and check the different measurements for anything out of the ordinary… Also run a new drive in a 'nursery' of sorts for 2-3 months before putting into production - logic there being if a drive has a manufacturing fault, use over a few weeks should cause it to manifest…
I will say two things about the these seagates drives (being a WD fan myself owning many over the years so biased), very fast read and write (~180mb per sec peak) and quiet…
Biggest negative is the head parking every 30 seconds (which I guess you could look around for software to disable the APM — haven't gotten that far yet)…
[Edit] Forgot to mention they also this month are selling Samsung dvd burners for only $16 — perfect for my microserver which is currently optical drive diskless.
http://www.centrecom.com.au/samsung-sh-224dbbebs-sata-black-…
What will it cost you to return it?
I expect it will cost me around $10 to return by courier, and assuming the product is defective and the engineers at Centrecom confirm, they will cover return shipping of a replacement drive the same day.
Unfortunately seagate tools does not show the drive as bad however the SMART data tells a different story, and the drive took around 20 minutes longer to format than the other unit with a delay of 4-5% during formatting.. Upon powering up it also did a crunchy head sweep 3 times the first time, where the functioning unit did no such sweep so I suspected something was not right within 3 seconds of turning on the drive.
Given the number of re-located sectors this drive during its first 5 hours of life, I would not trust it to store any data so back it goes!
It has coloured my opinion of seagate and makes me hesitant of buying any more of their drives - now if only WD could pull their finger out and release a 2Tb and 3Tb blue drive (their 3Tb Blacks are prohibitively expensive)
lol "engineers" at centrecom
I will try out crystaldiskinfo, looks good.
Any free software to "fix" a drive?
Depends what you mean by fix… If you mean repair bad sectors, then a drive will do that itself as part of its internal processes…. A sector that is bad cannot be repaired as such as its a defect on the physical surface so it internally is remapped to another spare sector. All drives have space set aside to remap bad sectors to so that you don't loose capacity. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that sectors would be stored on the outer rim where areal density is the greatest and that the allocation tables are usually stored in that location so any remapped sectors have lowest seek latency if they are at the start of the disk rather than the end (inner).
In terms of fixing a drive that has issues being read, you can try the spinrite software ($89US) that is designed to read bad sectors in different ways to try to recover data as well as using other techniques. Have not tried it myself.
The author says its good to run the software on a drive every few months to detect any issues before they become problems. Software works by writing data to a sector, reading it back, putting original content back and moving onto the next sector and so forth…
If I recall my WD marketing correctly many years ago WD hard drives would carry out self diagnostics every 8 hours by checking each sector when the drive is idle, checking the magnetic flux strength of written data and then correcting problems if there are any detected. I do not know if this is still the case given 4k sectors and newer recording technologies. With the number of sectors drives now have and eco goals, scanning each sector now would take far more time in idle than the typical drive is switched in idle to allow such a process.
The RMA process is quite good. I bought a Seagate Barracuda last year from New Zealand, but still managed to RMA here in OZ. Just had to get a box, bubble wrap the harddrive(Though they say you should use static-free wrap and foam cushioning in a sturdy box) and send it in for $8.95 or so after filling in the details like product and serial numbers at the Seagate warranty site.
I will probably never buy another Seagate drive in my life though. They're not safe for storing data you can't pira- er I mean legally obtain again.
I have more than 10+(each brand) on Seagate/WD and some hitachi drives….
wouldn't say one brand is better than the other
I'd prefer Seagate though but they change the warranty policies from 3 years(or 5 years?) to 2 years….
that alone prevent me from buying, do they have no confidence on their drives??
does no one else see the missed opportunity here for a pun
disk till dawn
or at least
dusk till dawn, but said in a kiwi accent
I can store more linux ISO's than i could ever install on this…
Legitimacy and all that :P
Decent deal ;)
EDIT - I got negged, which is fair i guess - given there seems to be reliability issues here which i was unaware of….
Ahh well, on the surface it seemed decent
Maybe i smell….
Dodgycom.
Sorry, but I can't buy from these guys anymore. Stung too many times.
hmm, was about to buy but since their in Melb I always have bad experience with interstate purchase. So I guess your comment just made me not buy.
I'll have to stick with sydney sellers and wait for a special here :(
I can't blame you. Bad experiences linger… =/.
+1
Centrecom ignored my emails about a ~$900 order for weeks, then finally cancelled without a single word of explanation or apology (despite the item still being listed as "in stock" on their website), then took another few weeks to refund my money. Never again.
Hmmm I can't say I'm a seagate man. Just had a 2tb model (non green) die just after 1 year wty. But have many other samsungs and wd's working well after 3+ years in nas. This one was recently located to new nas as cache drive only.
To be fare though - right now I wouldn't trust any normal base model 'any' drives.
No new model drive survives over 1 year anymore. Pay for the better quality/wty models.
Black or Red higher end models in WD.
SV or higher series in the seagates.
Yeah, I liked my Samsung drives until last week my 640gb died. Now I only have 1 Samsung drive that I like. And now we wont see any more Samsung drives as Seagate has taken over their HDDs.
My F3 Spinpoint weeps for its brethren that will never be born =(
What the heck are you doing to your drives? Mine are in use almost constantly downloading and I've had one fail. Ever.
Dont jinx it man…
I proactively replace drives after about 2 years, regardless of fault or SMART stats.
Sometime I get new problems, sometimes I'm sure I mitigate potential ones.
Who really knows if it works out better. I still backup critical data so a single drive failure wouldn't be that serious, just annoying.
My biggest single complaint at present is the damn APM on Seagate hard drives - I still can't disable it on one of my 3Tb units with either HDDscan or CrystalDiskInfo. 2 identical drives in different PC's, both Win7, same HDD firmware, 1 lets me disable APM yet the other doesn't. Soooo mad at that chirping noise considering it's in my media center.
Not sure if I should wait for even better deals, I have a HP Micro server with 3x 600gb Drives 1x 2tb Drive
decisions decisions! was looking at one of the 3tb Green drives as people say lower rpm = drive lasts longer as long as the drive gives me 90mb/sec throughput over my network I really don't mind =) anyone care to have some input for me?
Looks like the price of this hard drive the seagate was priced at $99 back in June this year.. but prices on hdd's are still recovering post floods.. Mind you I purchase the 2tb Samsung drive back at the start of this year for $99
$13 cheaper than msy.
you mean if centrecom allowed pickup on these?
13 cheaper delivered from centrecom vs pick up at msy. I don't know why 10% off is a front page deal but whatever. I guess living a block away from msy makes me a bit bias.
Lucky us, i also live very close to MSY :)
if you guys buying 10 = $130 saving!!
7200 RPM still the standard nowadays?
LOL!