Seagate ST3500641A-RK Barracuda 500 GB Ultra ATA/100 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive

My plan was to buy a large drive to backup up my computers and store it in a safety deposit box. After reviewing the unhappy user reports of the newer perpendicular technology disks, I decided to go with the older tried and true technology. The Seagate website lists the current three generations of this size disk: 7200.9, 7200.10 and 7200.11. Generations 10 and 11 are the new perpendicular storage technology.The particular part number I ordered, ST3500641A, is listed on the Seagate website as the 500GB 7200.9 generation. The part number on the retail box that I received is the same. However, the disk inside lists its part number as ST3500630A. When installed, the disk itself reports its part number as ST3500630A. The Seagate website indicates that this is the 7200.10 generation disk which has different specifications than the 7200.9.Sadly, what I got is the least desired disk of the three. If I had no other choice but the perpendicular storage generations, it would be better to get the second generation of the perpendicular storage technology: the 7200.11 disk.

I bought thru amazon this Seagate ST3500641A-RK 500Gb drive, but less than a week after I installed it in my winXp pro system, it crashed the system during a simple drive to drive copy procedure. Concerned, I ran a disk utility program, HDDlifePro-2.9.105, and the health and performance were rated at 47%. Speedfan, another HD health check program, confirmed these readings via an online evaluation. While the drive is still reported as healthy, it is not yet a month old, and I have many other disks several years old at 90% or over health and performance ratings. Health later rose to 51% but how can a BRAND NEW DRIVE fall to HALF its health nearly out of the box?I contacted Seagate support, and a reply took weeks, asking me to run again their mediocre utitility scan, which merely reports it as healthy without percentile numbers, and they labeled the issue as SOLVED. Great for them.I had copied 350gb of data to this disk, so I am loath to return it, specially since they may say that 51% is still healthy and I should accept it at that. But really, this is the second Seagate drive that has given me problems, while drives for Western Digital and other brands always performed fine. So Seagate may have the hype but not the delivery. I will never buy from the again.J. Rapalo

I used this in an external enclosure and it's typical Seagate. It does the job well and when I bought it, the price was also good.I work with Apples a lot and unlike some others, I've never had a problem with Seagate in the Apples. Note that's more common with SATA drives than ATA.

Largest ATA drive available, one of the better seagate drives. No issues with it. Great for extending your older computer's life.

Not a lot to say, I bought it, bought a BYTECC enclosure for it(the USB / 1394 combo), formatted it and it works great plugged into my XP and WIN2000 computers. I get the standard FireWire "delayed write failure" on both computers, but I also get it on another drive with a completely different enclosure and chipset(it has nothing to do with the disk drive). I get full USB 2.0 speed transfer rates both ways and I get full 1394 transfer rate on read. These are a function of the enclosure and interface, but the drive keeps right up with it.I have purchased three Seagate disk drives (two 2.5" laptop form factor, and this 3.5") in the past two years and I have been happy with all of them. It is worth a little extra money in my opinion for the quality so I just plain "don't have to worry about it".

I have had two of these drives fail. Neither had more than 30 hours of use. In fact I barely had all my applications installed. What was really nice was finding out the second one failed the morning of April 15 when I was attempting to boot up and submit my tax return.Very disappointing. They'll send me another drive but I'll not be installing my operating system or any critical files on it. Just too unreliabe. In fact I don't even know what I'm going to do with it. Seems silly to have a backup drive you have to backup onto another drive.I don't do any gaming or use any apps that place high demand on the hard drive. In fact the computer hasn't even been plugged in for three months. I used to like Seagate but they have lost a customer for life. When two units fail like this in less than 80 hours total use I believe its a pretty good indication of how good the product is.I should have listened to the reviewers before buying. But in the old days I had a Seagate last ten years without fail so my judgment was clouded. Clearly quality is a thing of the past with Seagate. These drives effectively wasted 30+ hours of my life.Buy this drive if you like to talk to people in India otherwise try another vendor.

I purchased this with the hopes that I could use it with USBExtreme to rip all my PS2 games to a HD to help 'clean up' my "man's room" so that they're not 60 PS2 game boxes out in the open. It first didn't work after spending many many hours ripping all the PS2 games to the HD. I took a week off and re-read the instructions and realized I needed to format it twice (once using the mgmnt tools in XP, the second time w/a file from USBExtreme). After I did this it WORKED! Mind you, since it didn't work the first time that doesn't mean anything was wrong with the drive - it was 'user error'. So as far as using it IN a computer for backing-up data etc - I have no comment - but for ripping PS2 games on a drive this size using USBExtreme - it works.