HGST HDS721050CLA362 (0F10381) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Thank you Hitachi, for being one of the *extremely* few HDD manufacturers to not kill your customers during the factory-rebuild time period (research Thailand’s floods if you don’t know what’s going on). If this hard drive hadn’t come down to $80 on Black Friday, I wouldn’t have been able to build my customer’s computer.

As a hard drive, so far it’s been a fast and dependable. No problems at all. 7200 RPM, not a green drive – so glad companies are steering away from them now.

Cons: None

Overall Review: If you’re looking to buy a hard drive, contact your local computer guy for a refurbished one. Your wallet will thank you, until the HDD prices drop later this year.

Pros: Dropped this into a workstation for a client. It seems fairly responsive for a standard 7200RPM mechanical. I would say that this is a good drive for a budget system. No clicking or extra noise either which is nice to know.

Cons: none

Overall Review: I liked that the HDD was packaged well for a bare drive. Generally, the bare drives I get are packaged pretty badly.

Pros: * Pretty good performance
* Reasonable price
* Quiet
* Brand-Name product

Cons: None so far (I only got it earlier today…). All SMART data / tests pass with flying colors; zero of those nasty reallocated sectors.

Overall Review: For those that are curious, I popped this into a USB 3.0 external enclosure, connected it to my desktop (via USB 3.0 port) and ran a speed test with CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64. Results (in Mb/s), first value is read, second is write:

Test 1: 2000 Mb, 3 passes:

Sequential: 141, 133.5

512k: 49.1, 45.2

4k: 0.588, 1.089

4k QD32: 0.657, 1.102

Test 2: 4000 Mb, 3 passes:

Sequential: 141.2, 133.2

512k: 47, 44.1

4k: 0.562, 1.026

4k QD32: 0.650, 1.007

Pros: I’ve ordered hundreds of these. A few have failed but the best part is that they are almost always DOA if they are bad, so I’ve rarely had a bad one out in the field. Fast, quiet, cool, a great drive. Also tends to be inexpensive in comparison to its competition.

Cons: I hope the WD buyout doesn’t change quality, at least in the short term.

Overall Review: My staple drive. If I need a basic SATA hard drive, I always go Hitachi.

Pros: Good price, works as expected, not noisy

Cons: Runs warmer than the same size Seagate

Pros: – I ordered four of these for a server with a failed RAID 10 array, and all four worked from the start!
– Very fast. Write speeds of around 80 MBps, and read speeds of around 500 MBps (as a RAID 10).

Cons: None that I can think of…

Overall Review: The packaging was great! I don’t know if Newegg is fixing their HDD packaging methods, or if it was because I ordered these from my company’s NeweggBusiness account, but these HDDs came individually packaged in these special boxes that “float” the drive in the middle of the box, and doesn’t allow it to come into contact with anything.

Those individual boxes were then placed in a larger box and wrapped in copious amounts of brown paper.

All in all, that box could have been dropped off the empire state building and the drives would have survived!

Pros: I’ve purchased over ten of these and had only one fail. Anymore, for hard drives, I consider this a reasonable rate of failure, considering how easy it is to get replacements through the manufacturer RMA process.
Also, these RAID well.

Cons: Nothing negative besides the usual pitfalls of magnetic based storage.

Overall Review: Perfect cheap little desktop drive with the option to RAID ’em.

Pros: These are big drives for a low price and have a good reputation. They purchased IBM’s hard drive manufacturing. The first drive did a long format error free and the RMA replacement for the second drive also formatted error free.

Cons: One drive had a small tear in the ESD bag and 2 corners of the cover were bent. The drive was DOA and not recognized by the computer. NewEgg sent a prompt replacement. I suspect some drives were dropped or damaged prior to NewEgg shipping them since they were well packaged when I received them.

Overall Review: I’ve had great Customer Service from NewEgg but losing the return shipping costs on defective merchandise makes some deals less attractive.