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This is probably a pretty poor review as the drive died after 3 days of use. I purchased it from Best Buy because it was on sales and the cheapest 1.5 TB external drive I could get in the store.  The Model Number is ST315005EXA101-RK.

The reason for purchasing such a large external drive was to provide a backup location for all my computers at home; 1 Windows Small Business 2003 Email/File server, 1 Windows XP desktop, 1 Windows 7 laptop and 1 Vista laptop. I need enough space to store backups for all those systems which equals roughly 1 TB is raw storage counts or about 700GB used space. I am using some free backup software called CrashPlan that I will be reviewing in the future.

Well I get home and within 2 hours I started hearing clicking noises randomly.  As I run some raw file copies (large 2-4GB ISOs) I notice the transfer rate is abysmal. I’m averaging around 5-7MB/sec sustained with bursts of 12-15MB/sec.  Just for reference an internal directly connected modern HD should easily do 60-80MB/sec, while a USB2.0 external should max out the USB bus around 25-35MB/sec.

As you can guess I was rather disappointed but then I justified it by reminding myself it was for backups. It doesn’t need to be a barn-burner to hold a ton of files for backups. I could live with a slow drive I kept telling myself.

However, after 3 days I found my fileserver locked up one morning. Upon reboot I checked the event log and there were literally over 12,000 I/O write cache corruption errors.  The drive spun up but when I ran scandisk the entire file system was basically blown.

The other issue I ran into and what I think might be the underlying culprit of the death of this drive is the running temperature. After 3 days of running the drive temperature was running around 54C (~130 F). That is way to HOT folks! At that kind of range you are drastically shortening your drive’s lifespan and pushing the threshold for data corruption (the physical media that holds the magnetic bits start to actually looses it’s ability to read and write the bits).  By the way your average internal drive with proper cooling usually runs in the 35-40C (~ 95 – 105 F).

I did some research online and found forums and review sites full of people that had the exact same thing happen to them with this drive. At this point I called it quits. I boxed up the drive and dug out my receipt. I returned it to best buy and exchanged it for a Western Digital MyBook Elite 1.5 TB external drive. After a few weeks of using this drive I’ll do a short review of it as well.