Pros: Works great until it dies.

Cons: This HD501LJ is my 4th Samsung disk drive die. This one worked fined for 14 months of light usage. It was in a fan cooled external USB enclosure and used to store infrequently accessed videos.

Other Thoughts: After 14 months of light use it began to lock-up and stop working intermittently. I moved the drive to another enclosure, and tried it on another system and the same behavior occurred.

Of the six Samsung internal hard drives I have purchased, I have now had four failures. Two 750GB and one 500GB units failed within the first two weeks of use. This one lasted longer, but still. The early failures NewEgg replaced. Samsung gave me a replacement RMA less than 24 hours after requesting one.

Although the guarantee seems to be good, a failed hard drive represents a loss of time (and possibly data) that will not be compensated. Since the last failure was intermittent I managed to get my data off, but I lost data that had not yet been backed up on an earlier failure.

Given the miserable track record I have had with Samsung drives I will not buy any more. Plus I have lost all confidence in the others I still own.

Pros: No real problems for more than a year...

Cons: After 7 months it started making clicking noises, I backed up my stuff and restored my computer to factory settings, but after I didall that it stopped clicking and hasn't had another problem since.

Other Thoughts: Other than its brief clicking problem this has been the best hard drive I've ever owned and would gladly buy another one.

Pros: Worked until it died.

Cons: It died after a few hours. I got the clunking noise and sent it back.

Pros: N/A

Cons: Drive was DOA. Any Read attempt on the drive caused it to make continuous "clunking" noises until power was removed. Is Samsung turning into Seagate now?

Other Thoughts: First a PSU, now a HDD. This is my unluckiest Newegg order ever... :(

Pros: I've had one of these running for almost a year. The SMART readings on it show absolutely no errors. Either they're working the numbers, or I got one awesome unit.

No errors. No noise.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: I've never seen another drive peg the SMART meters in SpeedFan, or show zero errors of any kind. My WD160s are in RAID, so I can't see the SMART data for those without some effort.

Runs at 37C in a CoolerMaster Cosmos, with two WD160 drives and two fanless vid cards.

Pros: Great drive so far. Hopefully it will hold up.

Cons: Non so far

Pros: None to speak of.

Cons: Obnoxious, persistent, and loud clicking.
Dead drive.

Other Thoughts: I've been a loyal Seagate owner for years. For some reason, I saw the customer choice award and the ten dollar price difference with this Samsung drive and splurged. Let's just say this is the last time I base a purchase on that award. I should have gotten the hint from the more than several bad reviews concerning this drive's loud clicking problems and boot failure. I spent hours trying to get past the post screen with the drive clicking the entire time. Once I finally got through and into Windows, the formatting process stalled ~28% of the way through and the drive ultimately died. Chalk another bad review up for this poorly constructed drive.

Pros: A Lot of drive space.

Cons: Very noisy drives. They sound like they are using a hammer and chisel to write to the platter. If I could do it all over again, I would have spent the extra money for some Segates. These were for my HTPC, and I'm hoping its not noticeable during movie playback...we'll see.

Pros: Has worked without issues for 1.5 years.

Cons: Failed after 18 months of near constant (24/7) use. Was expecting a longer lifespan. Even with backups, losing 500GB of data is not pleasant.

Other Thoughts: I have 3 more, hopefully they will not fail as well.

Pros: Drives are workhorses. Have 2 of these in a Raid 1 array for more than a year so I bought 3 more to add a second Raid 5 array to the server. Total of 5 drives now with 2 in a Raid 1 array (about 480Gb) and 3 in Raid 5 array (about 967GB), which suits my PowerEdge 1800 well.

Cons: None really.

Other Thoughts: Bad luck on my part maybe, but one of the 3 drives I installed in my Raid 5 array was reported as defective/failing by my CERC 1.5/6 Raid controller. RMA'd and waiting for replacement now. Ordering a 4th of this drive as well for a hot spare. This is the first time I've had a drive fail on me.