Review on Seagate BarraCuda 1TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 2.5 Inch SATA 6 Gb/s 5400 RPM 128MB Cache for PC Laptop – Easy Packaging (ST1000LM048) by Alejandro Raney

Given that hard drive manufacturers don't report SMR drives, it's becoming increasingly obvious why they haven't been more transparent about the technology. That's because SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording, sucks. It is buggy, slow and causes lots of read/write errors as Windows keeps checking/repairing the disk. I only expect this behavior from an old and worn hard drive, not a new one out of the box. Do yourself a favor and do not buy this drive or any of the latest SMR drives currently manufactured by Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba. Research and buy certified non-SMR products or buy from legacy tech stock. No matter what they say or what you hear, no matter what your intended usage plan is, save yourself the frustration and don't buy this or any other SMR drive. As for this particular hard drive, I have nothing but one buyer. regret for it. I can't return it because I've had it too long and I really can't trust it. I used it as a clone drive to support multiple computers and it didn't work. So I set the laptop as my system drive and that sucked too. Windows takes a long time to install, sometimes drivers take a long time to install, and then it takes a long time to write anything at all. Reading is fine, but then some document files get corrupted or Checkdisk goes haywire and wants to repair the disk. I had a very large spreadsheet that Excel said was corrupt and needed to be repaired. When Excel finally opened the damn file, several "sheets" were missing from the spreadsheet altogether. So now this drive is unreliable, corruptible and untrustworthy. Studying SMR technology led me to conclude that SMR technology is not a good idea.