Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST2000DL003

My digital life went into the proverbial turd bucket, when I tripped over my 70 pound boxer, and my open, running laptop and I hit the deck, while reading an article.Of course I lost months of accumulation, that I'll never get back. I had no backup plan. With several PC's in our household, Online cloud services didn't appeal to me, and since I was the proud owner of a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with four 250g Seagates, I felt I could use it as a solution. The problem is that that horse already left the barn.... but that's another story.I bought Acronis Home Image 2011, and started to use it to back up my PC's. My capacity before the upgrade was 676 gigs, and based on how my backups were progressing, I knew I better start looking at upgrading my drives. I checked the READYNAS website and got their list of the latest 2TB drives that they certified and off I went shopping.The price per TB has come down. The last time I looked at the price of upgrading to 4 x 1TB, I remember it being around $450, so it was a pleasant surprise to see twice the capacity at a much lower price point. I choose the ST2000DL003's because of solid reviews, and my partiality to Seagate.Now for some technical observations, for those looking to upgrade their ReadyNAS NV+.My ReadyNAS NV+ unit originally shipped with four Seagate ST3250620AS 250g units. with is set up X-RAID, so with the redundancy, I had 676GB of usable space. These drives had only ~8,000 hours on them, and they have never given me any issues. So I'm sure I'll find them handy to have around...With Seagate touting the new ST2000DL003 drives as "Green", I decided to take some before and after power readings. The old drives idled consumed 29 watts, and while the drive were working the NAS consumed 52 watts at the power cord.ReadyNAS's touted X-Raid technology worked as advertised. I started with drive #1, and here is a typical log report for the four drives:Tue May 17 12:15:23 EDT 2011 Disk remove event occurred on SATA channel 1.Tue May 17 12:15:24 EDT 2011 Disk fail event occurred on SATA channel 1. If the failed disk is used in a RAID level 1, 5, or X-RAID volume, please note that volume is now unprotected, and an additional disk failure may render that volume dead.Tue May 17 12:22:46 EDT 2011 Disk add event occurred on SATA channel 1.Tue May 17 12:22:56 EDT 2011 Disk initialization started. The estimated time of completion is 17 hour(s) and 39 minute(s), at which time you will be notified via email. You can also check the progress in Frontview in the Volumes -> RAID Settings tab. Please do not shutdown the system while the initialization is in progress.Tue May 17 17:45:49 EDT 2011 Disk initialization successfully finished.Tue May 17 17:45:49 EDT 2011 RAID sync started on volume C.Tue May 17 19:07:21 EDT 2011 RAID sync finished on volume C. The volume is now fully redundant.Then after 2 - 3 days of rolling the four drives in, the wrap up looked like this:Thu May 19 07:52:09 EDT 2011 The first stage of the in-place volume expansion is done. Please reboot the device to complete the volume expansion.Thu May 19 07:53:27 EDT 2011 System is up.Thu May 19 08:10:07 EDT 2011 Please close this browser session and use RAIDar to reconnect to the device. System rebooting...Thu May 19 08:10:08 EDT 2011 Rebooting device...Thu May 19 15:04:23 EDT 2011 Data volume has been successfully expanded to 5490 GB.The watt meter settled down to around 45 watts while the drives were active,and around 25 watts at idle.If you crave more room in you NAS, these drives at their great price point definitely fill the bill. The drives strike a good balance of lower power consumption, less noise and heat, and a fat buffer. Hope this helps!

I purchased 5 of these along with Synology DS1511+ NAS from Amazon back in April, 2011 for my home. I can't say about how they perform as internal drives for a desktop or in an USB/eSATA external enclosure, but I can definitely state that they work great as NAS drives. I have these configured as RAID6, which means you can lose up to 2 disks and still have your volume intact (but at point you won't have fault tolerance). The NAS I got itself is a high-efficient unit, and combined with these green drives it definitely consumes less power than the two servers that I replaced...and I have 5.44TB of fault tolerant storage accessible from my 10 PCs/Macs.I saw other reviewers commenting about them not being "high-performance" drives. That is correct, this drive was never intended to be used as your primary drive for your system. If you're looking for a high-performance drives, you should definitely look for 7,200/10,000rpm drives with 16/32MB cache.However, when used in a RAID configuration, these drives will deliver high-performance with overall reduced power consumption. In my NAS I was able to sustain around 160MB/S throughput writing to NAS over gigabit network (and even faster reading from it). There's nothing low-performance about these drives when used in a proper setting. The drive is also quiet. Standing next to my NAS, I can't hear any drive noise even with 5 drives side-by-side.Bottom line, don't purchase drives purely based on price and capacity. You don't buy Prius for high-performance, why expect high-performance from a "Green" drive? Identify what you're going to do with it, then look for qualifying drives for best result. I would have never purchased this to be used in my desktop (for performance) and neither should you.

This drive is really easy to use. I have 3 of these drives installed with a i3 2100 for a self built Windows Home Server v1.WHS v1 is a good test for these drives as they are based on Server 2003, which doesn't support Advance Format. Nothing was needed to be done, the SmartAlign must have detected Server 2003 and switched automatically. No driver, no jumper, no align software was needed and it worked immediately.I have had the server up and running for about 3 weeks now and the drives are super quiet. Even with a fan on the CPU and a fan on the power supply, my WHS is barely noticable except for the blue light on my server case. You really cannot hear the drives spin and I have had backups running non stop since the server started working.I am thinking about getting 2 more of these drives and setting up Raid 5 for WHS 2011, as WHS 2011 doesn't support drive extender. What really won me over with these drives over the Western Digital ones is the built in SmartAlign FW that allows the drive to switch without jumpers/software/settings/etc. Out of the box and they are capable of Advance Format or the 512 older style functionality.Good work Seagate. You have restored my faith in your company.

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