...$130 2TB drive! This is starting to get ridiculous!

That's right, a 2TB drive for $130. Granted, it's a Hitachi, so not top of the line quality, but acceptable. And at 6.5 cents per gig.....

http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0315534

I dunno why you say "not top of the line quality"... Hitachi built some of the first disk drives and have been a leader in enterprise storage for a while. You don't see many Western Digital 15K RPM SCSI Ultra320 drives and they just started entering the SAS market. Yah, the Deskstar (Deathstar) line had some problems at one point or another but so has all of the other manufacturers as well. I think that's a great deal with no compromise.

Their desktop lines just seem to not have quite the reliability/performance background as some other manufacturers...though now that I think of it, I'm not really sure why...I can't remember the last time I actually saw an in-depth review of one. IDK, maybe they just get glossed over so much that it's easy to ignore them.

The hitachi drive that my uncle purchased (because of the low price) stopped working within a week of him building his new computer. But then just before the warranty on the Rosewill power supply expired, that blew up.

We have 4 2TB Hitachi HDDs in a QNAP TS-410. They're running fine and without a hitch so far.

I always settle debates with one good statement; it's cheap for a reason.

...although, I have no issues with $4.50 "giant" pizza's from the local pizza shop that's trying to compete in the same area of four other large pizza chains, three of which are rather successful and two of those that are by far more popular than most food places in general and are used non-stop throughout the day. (protip: duh!? Oh well, just means cheap pizza for me! :p) ...(at least until they go out of business.)

Not $130 anymore, but now $140 with this promo code: EMCYPZX28 Still a great deal!

One word of warning here.

ALL of the Hitachi 2TB drives on the market right now are having issues. Even some of the 1 TB drives are having the same issues (except the newest models with the latest firmware).

The issue is bad block reporting. The 2tb drives are sending the controller bad block signals and there may be no bad blocks at all. It is a firmware issue from what I have been able to tell. You may never notice this until after the controller starts marking multiple blocks as being bad and your drive space goes down. I have been seeing this issue only because I have been using an Adaptec 5805 sas/sata controller with the Adaptec storage manager installed. ASM is reporting bad blocks constantly so I contacted Adaptec after swapping the drives and seeing the same issue. They are the ones that told me about issues with the firmware. They are investigating to make sure it is not something to do with the firmware on their controller, but they have seen this issue on their competitors controllers as well. Hitachi was contacted and they would not confirm any issues with these drives and basically ignored my support request and even closed it indicating there was no problem with their drive.

Most built in controllers do not have a way to report these bad blocks and just take care of them on the fly. If your controller has a reporting capability, I would be interested in seeing if anyone else is seeing multiple bad block errors.

I had a Hitachi 2 TB... Tried for three days and it still wouldn't format. Yeah, don't think I'll be jumpin on that deal.

Back in the day, I got caught up in the whole bad 60gb deskstar thing - I had three of the damned things and all of them were RMA'd twice, two of the three died again, but after a talk with IBM (this was pre-hitachi) about getting ANYTHING other than another definitely going to fail 60gb I refused to return them again - I was sick of losing data (not much of an issue due to backups) and more importantly time. I have no doubt that they will have solved the particular problem that plagued the 60's but I for one buy nothing but samsungs now - never had one fail yet - I know one will, eventually, but of all the drives I've ever owned (which frankly, is a LOT), they seem the most reliable so far