GadGets

I’ve dealt with Tiger Direct and would not deal with them again. Do a search on “Tiger Direct” and “scam” and you’ll get 126,000 hits. May be OK if Amazon stands behind it (but didn’t they buy Audible…?).
Rating: 1 / 5

[UPDATE 2/1/10: If you are having problems formatting here is something that helped me... Make sure your SATA drivers/firmware are up to date! If you are still having problems I used EASEUS's Free Partition Manager and was able to format the drive with no problems. I'm amazed at how much better EASEUS was at formatting the drive compared to Vista's built in Computer Management control panel at doing a simple NTFS volume format].

Picked up this drive on sale thru Fry’s for $149. Installation of SATA drive was straight forward. The formatting of the drive was not!

The Hitatchi instructions do not give any info on how to format your drive. It merely states to use your Operating System’s drive formatting tools. It would have been nice if they included the basics.

Using Vista’s Classic Control Panel’s Administration tools I kept getting “format could not complete” error messages. Kept trying different settings (quick format, NTFS) and even tried Acronis Disk Director to do the format to no avail.

After researching it for 2 days I found someone else having a similar problem and it turned out I needed an updated BIOS and SATA drivers for my NVIDIA 680 SLI motherboard.

A quick Format only took a couple of minutes, but since this drive is a replacement for a dead SeaGate Baracuda I wanted to do a full format and lock out any bad sectors so I don’t run into problems. I used my control panel’s computer management to mount the drive as RAW. I then looked in Windows Explorer and found the new drive and did a right mouse click on it to do FORMAT (I found this to be better than using computer management to do the format since you don’t get a progress bar, just a % read out). It took several hours for the progress bar to budge, but now 2 days later I’m finally at 50%. Two more days and I’ll finally have this bad boy fully formatted NTFS!!!

Not sure if any of this is Hitatchi’s fault, but a better installation guide and web site for trouble shooting would do wonders.

As for the other posts complaining about noise, I don’t notice it. Then again my rig is an Alienware 51 with lots of sound insulation. The drive slot uses plastic hot swap rails so maybe the lack of a metal to metal connection reduces the noises.
Rating: 3 / 5

I just pickup one today at Frys, its DOA. Very disappointed. I purchased 2 more few months later because it was on sale. They are HOT, much hotter than my Seagate and Western Digital, at least 10 Degrees hotter. They are very slow for some reason. I would not recommend this drive. I’ll purchase a different drive to replace the Hitachi.
Rating: 1 / 5

Just tried to install this drive and found out that they supply a SATA data cable but no SATA to L4 power adapter. Radio Shack does not carry them in store, so I just ordered one online for $0.95. Nice going Hitachi, for less that a buck you created an unhappy customer. I’ll be back with the rest of the story after my cable arrives……..

OK, I got the cable in just a few days, install was easy, the drive runs great. There were no instructions about needing to format the drive, but Window’s Help and Support got me going. Not bad over all.
Rating: 4 / 5

Plugged it into the Windows Home Server and it works fine. So far, so good.
Rating: 5 / 5