Seagate - Barracuda LP ST31500541AS - Hard drive - 1.5 TB - internal - 3.5'' - SATA-300 - 5900 rpm - buffer: 32 MB

Basic specs: This is a 5900 RPM drive, rated at 95MB/s max transfer rate and <16ms access (per the product manual). The power consumption is 3.0W idle and an an amazing 19dBA/20dBA noise--per the specs.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much after having disappointing (atrocious?) performance from WDC's "green" drives. As far as performance, however, I was pleasantly surprised. This drive tops out at 120MB/s--way above spec. The AVERAGE is 95 MB/s. Also, I was expecting access times (including rotational latency) to be well above 20ms. However, here again, I was pleasantly surprised with 14.7ms--way above spec.

OK, here's where I drop the bomb. I have no idea what kind of drugs Seagate was on when they came up with the acoustics. It is on their website, their datasheet, and the product manual. I have been impressed with past Seagate drives over their quietness, so I was really hoping this would be a very quiet drive at its rated 19dB which is even low for laptop drives. In fact, the low noise is the main reason I bought this. I didn't buy it for performance. I have SSDs and VelociRaptors for that. This is a media drive. And, the noise is obnoxious. This two-platter drive is louder than my 7200 RPM 4-platter Seagates. It is also louder than my VelociRaptors. The noise is also far worse than rated because it is a very high-pitched whine. About the closest I can think of is the old WDC Raptor 10K RPM drives.

As a final note, my Watt-Meter measured about a 4W difference between plugged in and not. This is at the wall, so considering power supply efficiencies, 3W or so is believable which is very low power.

In sum, this is a great drive for a file server that is far away in a closet somewhere. Its performance is good, and it is low power. Unfortunately, for a desktop or media center PC, the noise will give you a headache. There are better drives for those applications, like the older, quieter, 7200 RPM Seagates for starters. For any application where the drives sleep when not used, any power savings with this drive is just not worth the noise.

I have 6 2TB Seagate LP 5900 rpm drives in my readyNAS Pro, and so far so good.

Four of them I bought about a year ago (Frys). Two of them I bought on a sale from Microcenter recently.

Heat: I had a Hitachi 2TB 7200 rpm drive that was always 45 degrees when in operation. The Seagates were 39 degrees on the average.

Noise: I could hear my Hitachi clicking and trashing all the way from my living room to my dining room. Not so with my Seagates. When the plates started to spin I could hear the Hitachi do all kinds of noises as well. This was true when the Hitachi was in the NAS and when it was in it's own usb enclosure. When I removed the Hitachi from the RAID (after it failed) and added more Seagates, the noise issue was gone.

Reliability: My single Hitachi died, my 4 almost same age Seagates are cruising, now what are the chances of that happening...

In my experience, the Seagates are cool and so my NAS doesn't have to spin the fans too much, making the whole system silent. They are also relatively inexpensive, and somewhat power efficient. I do not need the hard drive speed in my NAS. However, if you are a gamer and plan to install a hard drive in your custom gaming PC, I can understand if 5900 rpm 3Gbs 32M cache is not going to cut it, and may be better off looking for something else that properly exploits the features of your motherboard.

I was worried about buying these drives back when I purchased them @ Frys given the problems that their previous 1.5TB line had. But so far these hard drives have not failed me.

I have had two of these drives operating continuously in a ReadyNAS storage device for the past three months and have just added a third. I have not experienced any of the failures or other problems that anybody here has described. All three disks, both the initial two and the third one that arrived more recently were well packaged in appropriate shock-insulating supports as well as in the manufacturer's anti-static foil bags. As expected, no instructions or other hardware were included which was not a problem given the intended use.

These drives are not quite as quick as faster enterprise-level drives I've used, but quite adequate for my needs especially when used in an environment where network performance is probably the bottleneck rather than drive performance. Noise was a bit greater than I might have expected and temperatures were quite good. Compared to smaller Pipeline HD drives they replaced, these are faster, cooler but significantly noisier and I would not recommend them for a DVR or any other application where quiet operation is important. On a lark, I did try using one in a Netgear media player but got inconsistent results, apparently due to the fact that the startup time was too long.

On the whole, I think the Barracuda LPs are an adequate lower-power alternative to enterprise drives in settings where maximum performance and minimum noise are not important criteria. Most likely will add a fourth to this array in the near future.

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