Microcenter has retail boxed Seagate 5900rpm 1.5TB's for $99. They only have 32MB buffer but that will only matter if you are using this as a primary hard disk.

Surprisingly fast as a storage drive, surprisingly slow as an OS drive. Buy accordingly.

Not many hard drive deals lately. I bought a 1.5TB Hitachi for ~$95 some time ago.

newegg reviews indicate a high DOA/failure rate

They're not especially slow, average performance is on par with top drives of a couple generations ago and some systems/uses simply don't need to shave 100ms off a 10 second operation.

#4 - considering WD makes roughly a half million hard drives a day, I can hardly see how 32 reviews on Newegg can indicate a high DOA/failure rate. But we do thank you for taking time to type your useless comment.

#6 - 34% of Newegg reviews for this item are 1 or 2 Eggs. #4's comments are worth noting.

5 egg - 48%
4 egg - 9%
3 egg - 9%
2 egg - 3%
1 egg - 31%

1 egg is 65% of the 5 egg value. That is extremely high.

Yes, but the percentage is from a very small sample. In addition, people with bad experiences are probably more motivated to write about them. This does not disprove your assertion that the drives have a high failure rate, but it doesn't prove it either.

newegg breaks all their harddrives during shipment by packing them in rocks.

#9, you are saying that if someone has a problem with the product, they will post about it. and this product has a lot of negative reviews. that must mean that a lot of people must have had problems, right?
if a lot of people are having problems, it would seem like a risky buy to me...

#11, you are forgetting that many people probably purchased the product and it has been running fine, but only a small fraction of them post good reviews on it. if you buy something, and it breaks, you're going to want to vent and post bad reviews about it, but if it's doing fine you're more likely to forget about posting a review.

It's been said that when a person has a good experience with a product/service that they will tell two other people. If they have a bad experience with a product/service they will tell 25 other people. In the world of customer service that is generally true. Take that with a grain of salt too.

1 drive failing (in such a short time) is too much!!!!! if you are backing up your data on that.

How many of those supporting that this is a good drive bought the drive. I bet I will not get very few replies.

Please let people express their opinion - good or bad. Do not bass them. This people to make an educated decision.

Thanks and I did not mean to bash anybody.

#14 I'm not bashing... but that is some terrible English!

#9 valid points, but the 1 egg % on the 1.5TB is higher than the 1TB (1 egg 8%; 5 egg - 44%) with a relatively similar number of reviews.

25 reviews - 1 TB
32 reviews - 1.5TB

So this added information makes the 1.5TB a even riskier purchase.

#12, by the logic of #9, if the product is good, it will get no reviews whatsoever. this is because people who don't have problems do not review the product (his logic, not mine).

similarly, if a user has a problem, they are likely to post a poor review. Thus, a large number of poor reviews is a good indicator for a large number of problems.

I do agree that the percentages of good reviews to bad reviews can be skewed by this, but looking just at the number of bad reviews should tell you...that there have been a large number of problems.

#17, I did not say that people with good experiences do not ever provide reviews. I was implying that such a small sample does not prove the drives are bad - or good. I was inferring the aforementioned theory that people with bad experiences are more likely to post reviews.

But even though I know this is statistically sound, (32 reviews out of thousands of drives sold), I will still probably stay away from these - but mostly because of reviews on amozon and new egg and the discussions on deal sites such as phat walette.