Seagate BarraCuda Mobile Hard Drive 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 7mm (ST500LM030)

When I decided to upgrade my micro PC, I knew I needed a hard drive that could keep up with my digital ambitions. Enter the Seagate BarraCuda 5TB Internal Hard Drive – a behemoth of storage that promises to turn your mini machine into a data-swallowing shark.First off, let me say, this drive is no lightweight minnow. It's a chunky boy, not suited for the delicate confines of a laptop. Trying to fit it into my micro PC was like trying to squeeze a sumo wrestler into skinny jeans—tight, but ultimately successful!Performance-wise, this drive swims circles around the competition. Speed and reliability are as advertised, making it a true powerhouse. Loading files, booting up, and transferring data feel like a breeze, even when dealing with massive amounts of information. It’s like having a turbo-charged engine in your tiny car.However, be warned, this BarraCuda is strictly for the mini machine crowd. If you attempt to put it in your laptop, you might end up with a device that resembles an overstuffed suitcase. But for micro PCs and other small form factors, it's the perfect catch.In summary, if you need a storage solution that's both speedy and spacious, the Seagate BarraCuda 5TB HDD is a reel-y great choice. Just make sure your device can handle its chonky design, and you'll be riding the waves of data with ease!

As advertised, well packed, promptly delivered. Thanks!

Works perfect for a OOSSXX dvr system, our original hard drive took a dump and this worked perfectly however they stated the original harddrive was a 2.5" sata hard drive and this was a fraction of the size as the original hard drive bur it worked perfectly, simply plug and play and format the hard drive, and the price was great as well for 2TB, couldnt ask for more

What makes this such a cheap 2.5-inch 5TB HDD is a non-standard data recording method called "Shingled Magnetic Recording" or "SMR". To quote Google AI,"When comparing a Seagate Barracuda with SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to one with PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), the key difference is that the SMR drive will generally have significantly slower write speeds due to its overlapping track design, while the PMR drive offers faster write performance, making it better for write-intensive tasks, even though the SMR drive might have a higher storage capacity at a lower price point."What that means is, it's good for data that you put on it once and never delete or update again, and slow for handling data that needs to be rewritten. I had to use mine for rewriting due to a lack of storage elsewhere, but every time I try to delete the latest version of the Unreal Engine 5 and replace it with the newest one, it makes the drive slow to a crawl. I have to constantly give my 5TB Barracudas down time and defrag them whenever I do big delete or write operation on them. I even had to open my computer case and point a full-sized desk fan at them whenever I run them just to keep them from overheating.Bottom line: Get this if you need a cheap, high-capacity 2.5-inch 5TB HDD you will never rewrite data to. But if you need drives to store data you want to rewrite on a regular basis, get a CMR/PMR HDD or an SSD.

I'm running five of these in my virtual storage pool (Windows Server 2016 storage pool) for my home server, four months so far. One drive developed two bad sectors, a reformat mapped them out. Maybe in another six months I'll trust them as much as the WD Red drives they replaced - until then all my volumes are three-way mirror, and I have offsite backups.Temperatures are low, of course - a main advantage of going to 2.5" drives. And these are pretty much silent. Not the fastest kid on the block - no surprise there. Still, I see less impact from SMR than I expected.It's interesting to note that the external version of this 5TB drive contains the exact same drive. Everything except drive serial number is exactly the same externally, as well as firmware and any other params I could inspect with HD Tune. At the time of writing the price for an external drive is 119 vs 189 for this internal version. Of course, pulling out the drive from the external enclosure voids any warranty, so it's really a question of how much the warranty is worth. Will more than one out of three drives fail during the warranty period?UPDATE 8/17/2018: All five drives have been running well since January. I wiped and reformatted them back then before redeploying. I have a spare drive but am not bothering with hot swap as uptime is not critical for my home server - I can accept a day's downtime if a drive fails hard. These little drives are performing as well as can be expected. Raising to five stars.UPDATE 12/16/2018: It's been a year now for most of my drives. Still running well. One drive has disconnected from my SAS card twice, hard to tell if it's the drive, card or cabling. In the process I got to see how well double redundancy works - the storage pool didn't even flinch, no downtime, no readonly mode, just rebuilt redundancy using free space on other drives while on single redundancy for a few hours. I ejected and reinserted the disconnected drive, and everything was back to normal again (albeit a bit unbalanced free space).