I am not going to say here is something incorrect with these drives, because at the end of the day I’m only one guy with a terrible experience. I’ll just offer my review here so that people get a full perspective. I have had two of these fail on me in a row, failing offline SMART tests. When it was working, the guide was very quick and silent, though, so I can certainly know the high marks people give these drives when they work.

I reflect it is honest to say that Seagate is really running these at the ragged edge of what is doable. While the transfer tariff can approach 90 Mb/s at the edge of the serving of food, according to a few instant tests I ran, the transfer rate fluctuates greatly, and the guide shows a sweet constant spill of software-corrected (ECC) errors. In other words, you’re not bringing up the rear data, but the data coming off the guide is on the border of what is readable, such that the guide needs to rely on error correction and/or rereads (hence the fluctuating speeds) to get the data off. I base these conclusions on the fact that tests of data on the inside of the serving of food (which has much less speed) are much more reliable (albeit slower).

If you do choose to get one of these, do yourself a act of kindness and backup (which you should do anyways, because all hard drives are subject to fail at any time).

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I bought two of these new 500gb 2.5″ Seagate drives (both with firmware 0002SDM1) to upgrade two of my MacBooks, spec’d out as follows:

MacBook Pro 15″: MB134LL/A 15.4″ 2.5Ghz Intel T9300 Core 2 Duo Penryn (stock Fuji 250gb 5400rpm SATA)

MacBook 13″: MB404LL/A 13.3″ 2.4Ghz Intel 8300 Core 2 Duo (upgraded Hitachi 320gb 7200rpm Travelstar)

I used GRC’s SpinRite (an awesome utility) to pre-test the drives before bed in. I ran a level-4 test which examine, reads, and writes to each party sector twice without any OS or guide level error correction. This test took about 28hrs per 500gb guide. Both drives tested 100% with no terrible sectors and surrounded by spec on ECC error correction utilization. You can bet that on a guide as data-dense as these 2.5″ 2-serving of food 500gb guide that the ECC will be very well utilized over time.

I used Xbench (another fantastic utility) to get the following specs on my pre-upgraded systems (cumulative score of the hard guide battery of tests). Remember these are arbitrary #s, not speeds, not throughoutput, and should only be judged against other Xbench #s.

MBP 15″ (stock 5400rpm Fujitsu): 37.94
MB 13″ (upgraded 7200rpm Hitachi): 42.00

Using SuperDuper to assumed role the ancient drives to the new Seagates using a FIrewire guide caddy took approx 3-4hrs per guide (approx 250gb of data on each fund) leave-compelling the Seagates as bootable clones with no partition resizing necessary. Running Xbench again on the newly upgraded systems they both respectively scored:

MBP 15″ (ST9500420AS): 51.59 (a 35.98% improvement)
MB 13″ (ST9500420AS): 48.91(a 16.45% improvement – a small startling of an improvement given that the ancient guide was also 7200rpm w/ 16MB reserve and 100% original sectors).

Both drives are seemingly as silent as the ones they replaced. I will revise this review should their be any notable observations on long term wear/reliability; observed guide/case temp; battery usage, etc.

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My guide started to make a loud “clunk” sound about a week after I installed it. I just spoke with Seagate warranty specialty and they said that it would cost me .95 to have them ship me a new guide under warranty. The warranty rep said that neither he nor his managers have the authority to waive this fee.

It’ll cost me nothing to return it to the retailer as defective, so I’ll do that today instead.

Edited on 10/14/09 to add:

The replacement guide has already started to rattle and it occasionally makes a clunking sound like the first one that I returned. Based on my limited experience with this product, it seems to have a high defect rate and poor warranty service.

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