Seagate Samsung Spinpoint M8 ST1000LM024 (HN-M101MBB/EX2) 1TB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5″ Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: 1TB 5400RPM
Used as an External
Formatted HFS+ for my Apple Macbook/Powerbook Laptops.
It works.

Cons: It runs a bit hot and loud.

Overall Review: Make sure you do a surface format on the drive before using it. I’ve read through the reviews and a lot of you have mentioned the drive failing after some time. If it fails, I will post another review with my experiences.

Pros: Size. 1TB (931 after NTFS formatting) holds a lot of data. The drive is also quiet. This drive shipped with my Lenovo Y510P laptop. I hoped it would work well enough. See below…

Cons: SLOW. Too slow to use, unless you have the patience of a saint to wait for Windows and applications to load. Loading Premiere Pro CC on this drive took over 2 minutes. The 5400RPM and 8MB cache are brutal. I had to buy a new 250GB SSD to replace this as my boot drive.

Pros: Awesome price point and capacity for a notebook drive. Works like a dream in my MacBook Pro.

Cons: It’s only 5,400 RPM and a relatively small cache. 7,200 RPM would be nice and a 32/64 MB cache, but I can’t complain too much about it.

Pros: 1TB Laptop drive.

Cons: 5,400 RPM
SATA-II

The worst part of this drive is the 8MB cache. Most modern drives have 16-64MB of cache. The small cache on this drive results in extremely slow performance and slows the drive significantly.

Overall Review: I got this drive in my Samsung Series 3 laptop. Thats any laptop starting with NP300E5C that comes with a 1TB drive is probably this. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why my computer is so slow and I think I finally figured it out.

RAM wasn’t the issue. CPU wasn’t the issue. Its this drive. The 8MB cache in theory would reduce power and heat a little, but will slow performance greatly. It significantly bottlenecks performance and cause all loading to occur extremely slowly. I am upgrading to an SSHD to replace it.

Pros: So far working great — not intended as a main OS drive, this is an old school 5400 rpm drive. Its passmark rating is even a bit lower than the WD blue drive of same size, so don’t expect blazing performance.

Buy on price.

That’s what I did.

Cons: Con? Well it says Samsung AND Seagate on the label. So what does that mean for reliability?

Is it seagate reliable or is it samsung reliable?
Does the brand combination make it better than either alone?
Or worse?

Overall Review: There have been over 200 reviews of this drive. Most are of the character, “its a drive, it works”

So all I can say, is its nothing fancy, but it is inexpensive. If you are looking for a second hard drive to live in the dvd bay of your laptop or in an external enclosure, you’ve got a good candidate here.

Pros: Finally a 1TB drive that is a sleek 9.5mm in height. Every PS3 owner that has tried to upgrade their HDD to the 1TB capacity has hit the 12.5mm spec and cried. Installed this into my fat PS3 and it slid right in. After an initial format, the system is reporting 828GB/931GB, which is correct.

Cons: None so far.

Pros: They were on Sale with free shipping? Got here in a day.

Cons: I bought two of these with the thought of upgrading a couple of my Laptops. One failed within a Month or so. The other is still in the ESD wrapper and unused. Might use it for an external for temporary and non-essential stuff. RMA’d the first one, and of course they swapped me for a refurb. Bought a new “Other” brand drive to replace it while their SLOW exchange service got around to getting one on my doorstep. Took over a week with Second Day Air? Would not even consider using the other “new” one for my primary laptop. Didn’t lose data, since the drive was backed up. It was the kind of failure that starts with a ton of bad sectors and read errors. Laptop is not moved around and doesn’t travel. It’s never been bumped. Failed the DST tests when performance started to degrade. I’m an IT guy and have seen several of these drives fail in a similar fashion on some client’s systems. I’m glad I didn’t sell them the drives. Took a chance and got burned.

Overall Review: Won’t use these for a primary laptop and won’t store anything essential on them. Should have known better since having troubles with a number of Samsung drives after their acquisition by Seagate. Tried to save a buck and paid the difference for shipping, etc on shipping for an RMA. Should have bought the usual brand in the first place. I guess you sometimes get what you pay for. Not saying other brands won’t fail, just haven’t seen too many of one brand/model fail in a short period of time like this in a number of years. On the bright side, My Laptop gets a fresh install and a New Drive!…..Again

Pros: 1TB. Runs cool. Same price per GB as 750GB 5400rpm drives, and this will only get better with time.
Was able to fit it into my Thinkpad X220 by modifying my laptop’s chassis slightly.

Cons: 5400rpm, so slower than 7200rpm drives. Around 90MB/s sequential read/write. 512K random read write around 32MB/s.

Still – not a huge issue for me, though, because I’m using an 80GB Intel Soda Creek SSD in my mSATA port for my OS and programs. Just know that this drive is no speed demon if you plan to use it is as your main drive.

Overall Review: Right now, this is the only game in town if you want a 1TB 2.5″drive that will fit in most computers without making any modifications (9.5mm). It’s a great feeling knowing that you’ve maxed out your laptop 🙂