Seagate 1TB Constellation SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 2.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST91000640NS)

I originally purchased this used on Amazon and sent it back because the spindle wouldn't spin up. I then purchased this one at full price and found I had the same problem. Turns out the drive needs 5V and 12V, but most if not all small external drive cases only supply 5 Volts because of the USB specification. I purchased an adapter that works with 2.5 or 3.5 bare drives, and has an AC adapter that provides the 12V while the USB connection provides the 5V. It works great for me. It's very fast. I get no beachball when accessing songs from all over the drive. I also use other playback applications that sometimes play other audio files at the same time itunes is running and that seems to be no problem even though the drive has to access 2 sections of the platters at the same time (moving very fast back and forth). The drive is silent as far as my ears are concerned.I would love to have an actively cooled aluminum external case in a compact size for this drive. I ended up building my own out of 1/8" aluminum. It's 5 sided and the adapter I bought covers the open end. The drive slides in the opposite end which is covered and is mounted to the bottom.

The Seagate Constellation series drives are their enterprise level drives. Different firmware from the consurmer drives, and much better reliability. Also, these drives are consistantly compatible with all RAID levels, in pretty much any system. I am using them in QNAP NAS boxes. These are not the highest capacity drives in the series (they have 2GB drives that are 3.5" size), but the smaller drives have a lot more room around them for cooling, when mounted into tight NAS box configurations. And cooling is everything to the drive's life span. You get what you pay for with these little drives.

So I don't know what size this drive is in MM or inches but its like in between 3.5 and 2.5.. Its a very odd size that will not fit a macbook Pro or even a Asus G75 laptop. Also the drive was DOA (dead on arrival) Maybe its just bad luck but for you guys looking to buy for a laptop please find the size to the MM of the drive.

I have a DELL R710 that already has three 15k SAS drives and wanted more storage that didn't need to be as fast.With five bays available I ordered (5 Pack)2.5" SAS/SATA Hard Drive Tray Caddy for Dell G176J PowerEdge R710 T410 T610 T710 R815 and then ordered five of these drives. Attached the drive to the tray caddy (NOTE: screw the drive where it indicates SAS not SATAu) and put them in the server while it was powered down. I booted up, went into the Perc Raid controller, saw the drives and added the new RAID5.After initialization and a reboot, the drives were seen by vSphere ESXi 5.0 U1 and I mounted it as a new datastore. Since there were 5 drives, my IOPs are higher than just doing three and disk latency is minimal. In real world applications, I have 5 Windows 2008 R2 VMs running on them and three Virtual desktops and no complaints from users.So five stars and two thumbs up!

I was building a 2U Intel server with the Grizzly Pass server boards and needed a few SATA RAID drives. The chassis has 8 SATA 2.5 inch slots. I started with two Contesllation drives in RAID-1 configuration. While some people put the OS on two RAID 0 drives spinning at 10K RPM, I found that the 7200 RPM Contellation drives are about as good. I would rather add SSD's thatn goping with the more noisy and power hungry 10K's. These drives are on Intel's tested configuration list for the server board and chassis so that's one less thing to worry about. I have always had excellent experiences with Seagate and these drives are no exception. They just work, have an excellent performance and the price is right.