Last week I purchased a 2.5' Seagate firecuda ST2000LX001. (chinese manufactured) This is not a review because that disk seemed to have problematic heads/stervo... and already returned it as D.O.A. I only post this because from amazon and newegg reviews and from http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/192181/ST2000LX001-1RG174 it seems that there is a pattern of high percent problematic disks. The good: - very nice disk with 2tb storage. - nice looking externally (loved the design) - seagate support: prompt reply, tried to help and seem they care about their customers. - when it works correctly you should get speeds (if no chase is used) of 140mb/s at the beginning of the disk and 70mb/s in the end of the disk. - silent and low temps The bad (*if you are unlucky and a get problematic drive like the one that I tested): - The speeds will vary with each test. When it works fine the disk is silent and speedy. When it miss behaves it gets slow and you can hear it struggling (light ticking noise) - The miss-behavior is triggered easier when you scan the drive from the end versus the beggining and you should scan the entire surface (partial scans won't reveal the problem). - I got speeds that varried (on the same lbas, first 100gb from the beggining) 140mb/s, 120mb/s, 80mb/s, 70mb/s, 60mb/s, 45-50mb/s and 7-15mb/s. I post a few of the screenshots from the 11 tests that I run in 2 different systems. Panagiotis
