When Amazon ran a promotional pricing on these Hitachi hard drives, I leapt on the chance to upgrade my existing 1TB drives and make space for future storage requirements.
The drives arrived packed fairly well, but the creative cardboard suspension of the box design did not leave a lot of open air space around the drive. It would have been preferred to see some additional packing or buffer material to better protect them during shipping. I understand that the drives are sold as OEM and that there is a growing initiative to conserve on consumed materials, but these are very sensitive devices.
Upon unpacking and installing the drives, I ran a full disk format and surface test on each of them. The first two had no issues and SMART reported no trouble areas. The third drive, however, produced a scattered set of unreadable/bad sectors and SMART reported surface errors and slow to read/unreadable areas. The drive was usable, as bad sectors can be and are often remapped to remain unused, but I opted to exercise Amazon's great return system and had a replacement drive sent to me. The replacement drive tested just fine, and they are spinning away in my system.
I've owned enough hard drives over the years to understand that there are failure peaks at installation time, and can characterize the compromised drive as an early/factory defective. I have no doubts as to the reliability the drives once put into field service and when they have passed the initial surface verify/SMART tests. I feel that this is a good practice for any system builder or end user - a few hours of testing can prevent weeks or months of headaches as you try to track down what ultimately stems from a first-use defect.
As to the drives themselves, they run extremely cool; they remain room temperature even after continuous use, in stark contrast to many 7200RPM models. They are also extremely quiet in operation, barely audible by themselves, and certainly nothing that will noticeably raise the noise level of a typical computer enclosure. This would be a good drive for a MicroATX or Home Theater PC build, where cramped conditions can cause temperatures to soar. It would also work well in an external drive enclosure that does not utilize a fan for cooling, as little heat will need to be dissipated through the case. Transfer rates are very respectable, averaging at about 100MB/s across the disk surface for read speeds. Great for media storage, or for a NAS or other networked storage array or backup solution.
I'm very happy with the drives - they were a great value and are perfect for my application. Spacious, cool, quiet and an excellent complement to a solid state boot drive. I did get a drive that showed signs of failure right out of the gate, but I won't fault the other drives for what is very likely a statistical outlier.
Recommended!