Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive - Bare Drive $120AC@Newegg

My manufacture date is 09/2012. Want to know the best part? I used SeaTools to test the drive beforehand and it all came out fine, after about 12 hours :/. I used the warranty checker (link in the SeaTools app) on seagate.com to check the drives warranty - i believe it was January 2013. This is no surprise (it should be a year) however, the internal drive had a warranty out to 25-Dec-2015 . I should have never bought that squaretrade 2 year warranty .

edit: I can also confirm again that the model is ST3000DM001 and no, the enclosure wasn't soldered to the drive ."

So roll the dice, you may get a better warranty with an 'external drive' .

Also, is there a way to quote a post from another thread?

I can't find a link to it, but the 3tb Seagate Expansion was $90 and the 3tb Backup Plus was $100 on Amazon right around black friday. Both of those drives are external versions of this drive.

$90? can you link me this deal, I must have smoked too much and missed it

Sounds like you did.. it was $90 last BF.

I got one of the 3TB amazon deals, just never saw the $90 deal in my deal alerts, any links so I can see where things went wrong?

Read this if you are thinking about using these in a NAS. I would get the WD Red.

http://www.amazon.com/review/RQNP...6&store=pc

Here's the prob you may not have either wty since you cracked the case, the external wty is void if they determine you've tampered or altered the setup. Also if the drive is tracked in their internal database as being part of an external kit then they may refuse to honor that as well. Hopefully you never have to find out, but folks have been bitten.

If you read the Seagate forums, you will find that people have been able to get rhe warranty as an external drive as they allow you to break it open for "data recovery" purposes. Just get permission from them to do so when you get the RMA and before you send it back and you will be fine.

You will not get warranty as an internal drive since it has firmware specific to external drives and will be in their databases as external.

this is a solid drive, but i sort of have a silly problem with it
I have one from an earlier SD that I use as the "data" drive in my recent build that has an Intel SSD for the OS. But this drive often goes into "semi-sleep" state when not in use and when it is time to get something from it or write something to it, I literally hear the drive starts spinning and there is a good long 4-5 seconds gap each time this happens.
once it awakens, the drive performs really fast, though.
It might just be some setting that needs to be done, but I thought I should mention this. I also had to do some special Seagate driver stuff before Win7 could recognize all 3TBs