Just a piece of warning: Seagate has a serious problem. It seems that some series of drives have total failures within the first couple of months. It is claimed that up to a third of the drives will fail this way. This is all due to a firmware problem, according to Seagate. I’ve heard rumours of deeper problems, but that’s all they are right now, rumours. The affected series are roughly 500, 750, and 1000 Gb drives in the 7200.11 series, including ES.2 server grade and desktop grade. Jeez… yes, I’ve got a number of those…
Anyway, now you know. Gentlemen, start your worry engines.
Update Jan 20: Just talked to my distributor in Sweden (Dustin) about this. They don’t have any policy. They have no idea what I’m talking about, or maybe they do and just pretend they don’t, but they say these drives have a 0.2% failure rate and if one fails they’ll see if (!) they would do something about it. BTW, I have four that are one week old, and that’s their policy on this. And, no, they would not consider halting sales of these drives, even though the failure rate is estimated to 30%. They won’t consider changing the drives to another brand unless they’re bricked first (easily done, just update to the official SD1A firmware…) IOW, don’t trust your distributor. They don’t giva sh… at least this one doesn’t.
To follow this drama as it develops, check out the Seagate support fora.