I bought two of these as a replacement for a pair of 250GB Maxtor SATA drives that are on their way out. This is a very fast drive and after installation I could immediately see the difference in performance compared to my old SATA drives (I expect this is due to the 30MB buffer - the Maxtor's they replace had 16MB). The Barracuda's are also much quieter than the older Maxtors that they replace.

Installation was pretty straightforward, but as others have said by default the drive is shipped with a jumper installed that throttles the drive back to SATA 1 (1.5GB/s). If you have a SATA 2 controller/motherboard (3GB/s) then you'll need to take the jumper out so that you get full speed. The jumper is difficult to get at being recessed into the enclosure at the rear, but it is also quite small/light so I managed to tease it out using nothing more than a safety pin in the end.

The only major issue with this drive is the prevalence of batches still being sold which have faulty firmware. If you search for "seagate 7200.11 firmware" you'll find lots of information about this issue. Basically, the firmware shipped with earlier batches of this drive has a fault that can cause the device to "brick" - basically the drive/data is OK but the controller refuses to talk to your BIOS, making it completely inaccessible. Once the drive has bricked firmware updates will not resolve it and you have to return it to Seagate for replacement.

This problem can be prevented by flashing the firmware on the drive before you use it in anger. Details and new firmware are available on the Seagate website. The label on the drive tells you which Firmware is installed - in my case both drives arrived with the SD15 firmware, which according to the Seagate website is the version which suffers from this problem. Flashing involves burning a bootable CD-ROM and booting from that in order to burn the firmware update. My drives are now at SD1A following the update and (fingers crossed) should be cured of this problem.

This is a pretty straightforward exercise, but in my view it's inexcusable that Seagate and/or their suppliers allow drives with this faulty firmware to be sold. I bought my drives only a few weeks ago (before I'd learned of this issue), so it seems there are lots out there still with this problem (which Seagate has known about since last year).

So all in all an excellent drive, excellent performance for the price, but I have a knock a star off for the firmware debacle - Seagate should really be recalling these - the drive itself is cheap, but my data is irreplaceable!