April 8th, 2008 3 min to read

New 500GB hard drive, Seagate(ST3500641AS-RK) SATA/300

Category : Computing, Hard Disk Drive

Well I just installed me a new 500GB internal hard drive. It took me awhile to decide on which manufacturer to go with, but this Seagate comes with a 5 year limited warranty and was on sale at a good price. In other words, I just couldn’t pass it up. I really wanted a 1TB hard drive, but the price just didn’t make sense. What I mean is I seen 1TB drives for around $300, 750GB for $200+ then I got my 500GB for $104. I was satisfied with my deal. Time to install.

Installation took me around 1 hour because HP does not make it easy to install hard drives. I have a HP a1210n desktop and it’s been good to me so far, except for the DVD drive, it crashed and now is useless. Most people can probably install a hard drive in 10 mins or less, but this was my first time so it was a bit confusing. Another problem I ran into was the dust. Dust was EVERYWHERE so I decided to clean it up a bit and that took a good 15 mins. Cleaning dust from a computer that was never taking apart (except to add RAM) is NOT easy. First, I am allergic to dust and when I come in contact with it, I constantly sneeze and my eyes get bloodshot. Second, when you try cleaning it, the dust just starts going everywhere. I even seen it floating up, making more of a mess. Aside from constantly sneezing from the dust, the installation was easy since all you have to do is look at the current hard drive and connect it the same way. The strange part is my original hard drive is a Seagate also, so I thought that was a good thing. The hard part was mounting it. The hard drive came with 4 screws and stupid me tried to screw in the screws after mounting it. Well about 10 mins later I realized that it can’t be done like this. I had to take it out and screw in the screws BEFORE mounting it. Oh, and I noticed from doing research on the internet about installing hard drives that most DELL’s come with trays to mount it, my HP did not. The result? A brand new hard drive scratched up trying to mount it incorrectly. After about an hour of frustration, aggravation, sneezing and bloodshot eyes it was finally done. Time to boot it up.

When booting up my computer the new drive was making noise so I knew everything was hooked up right. After windows loaded, I put in the CD that the drive came with to format it correctly. The CD gives you a few options to choose from. Whether you want your new drive to be the main drive or a secondary. I chose to have it as a secondary drive. After a bunch of questions, it was time to format. The format to NTFS took about 1 min. I was a bit shocked as it took only a min, usually it will take an hour or more depending on your system to format a drive. I guess this drive came in NTFS already instead of FAT16 or FAT32.

Well onto the review of the HDD(hard disk drive). The drive had a total of 465GB, I knew it wouldn’t be a full 500GB. I did a transfer of a few files from my original hard drive to the new drive and the ‘time remaining’ on the transfer was a bit messed up. I thought I should test it again by downloading some files to it, so I did. While I was downloading the drive made a LOUD clunky noise and it would not stop. I gave it about 15 mins and still the noise would not stop. Not even my original hard drive made that much noise. Still sneezing and not able to see very clear, I started looking for the receipt, but decided to wait to the next day to make my decision since the time was around 1:00AM. Next day came so I tested the drive once again. The drive did stop making the loud clunky noise and only made noise when it was working. The noise is not that loud, but still louder than my original. I decided to keep it. The drive works great and so far no problems. I can’t compare it to any other manufacturer like Western Digital, but I am satisfied with my Seagate(ST3500641AS-RK) and would recommend it to my friends.

Comments (10)

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    Marlon T April 8th, 2008

    AHAHAH, How'd your DVD drive die? You're burning too much illegal stuff man! Sounds like a good buy, was it SATA, PATA, or EIDE? I've got two SATA WD drive and love those things to death. My main drive is one EIDE Seagate 200G and it doesn't seem to make much noise (only my damn Plextor drives - sound like jet engines when spoolin'). I'd definitely recommend Western Digital SATA drives. 1x 80G and 1x 250G WD SATA's is what I have now.

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    Matt R April 9th, 2008

    haha yep my dvd burner burned to many things and burned out. MAN if u read the damn title you will see its SATA! STUPID!!!! WEstern Digital from what I heard is going out of business..dont know if its true or not but thats why they dont offer a long warranty anymore!

  • avatar image
    nic22 April 10th, 2008

    yes, i also installed a seagate 750gb internal eide, $150 from newegg.com, couldn't pass this one up. after figuring out that the drive has to be formatted(which took a little over 3 hours) and me being the impatient person that i am i stayed up to about 4am waiting to be able to access my new drive. install took all of about 5 min. this drive (st3750640a)is pretty quiet, actually is very quiet, i don't even know it is there. I would definatly recommend this to others.

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    Jeff April 10th, 2008

    I need a good upgrade to! my wonderful 200 gigs is just not cutting it nowadays. before you know it your computer is filled up then you have to backup a bunch of dvds, then couple months later its filled up again. I guess I need to stop downloading! haha never!!!!!!

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    Marlon T April 10th, 2008

    "MAN if u read the damn title you will see its SATA! STUPID!!!!" Hater. I think you just changed the title to make me look foolish! Sumofbitch :-P WD FTW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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    Marlon T April 10th, 2008

    @Jeff: Just go for the 500G -> 1TB Model drives, they are faster and hold more information. Or go for an external, that way you can have your stuff on the go!

  • avatar image
    Matt R April 11th, 2008

    External drives are good for on the go but what about on the fly? some may not be able to keep up with download speeds of 3.0megs or more.

  • avatar image
    Marlon T April 30th, 2008

    Hmmm. USB2.0 is pretty quick, I don't think 3meg quick, but, just download to your current HD, then tx over? Instead of doing direct, or maybe better yet go for a home server, setup a good firewall/switch/router 10/100/1G and you should be good.

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    Matt R April 30th, 2008

    i could transfer after i d'l to my main drive, but its already filled up :) or go with the setup u mentioned ha

  • avatar image
    Marlon T May 24th, 2008

    Hah! Jeff should just get an extern drive and call it a day.