Should I buy 1.5TB Seagate drives?

[neonplanet40]

Hi guys, I'm currently out of space on my Home Server. I have seen these for £108 each which is really good considering 1TB drives are £80 +.

Are these drives reliable? I've been reading about and there have been problems with them so I don't want to put something in that is going to corrupt my 3TB of data.

What i want to know is are these drives reliable and is the bad reports just limited to a bad batch? Also will these drives have the 5 years warranty or the new 3 years warranty seagate announced last month?

Thanks for the replies guys

Mark

[arthurleung]

Those 1.5TB drives are only out for a few months so there is not much reliability data available out there. There had been problem with firmwares, but you shouldn't be getting those drives now on web retailers unless you're buying from place like PCWorld or ebay where there could be very old stock.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...rranty_matrix/
New warranty length is here, regardless of what the retailer says. Most of them wouldn't bother to update the product page anyway.

If you really want the 2 years of extra warranty, perhaps you should buy one of those FreeAgent 1.5TB drive which only cost like 20 quids more.

I have 4 of those running in a low-load RAID5 arrays (with the supposely problematic firmware) and they're running perfectly stable.

There is always the options of doing backups or RAID5 purely for against disk failure.