subject: St310005exa101-rk | St310005exa101-rk Add Storage Instantly! [print this page]
By FlipFlop
Bought this ST310005EXA101-RK 1.5TB drive in local Fry's in Bay Area over the weekend since it was cheaper there. Drive is neatly packaged with cellophane film on the top to avoid finger-print/scratches/dust on the shiny/glossy surface. There is a small green LED activity light in the front but its very tiny and doesn't annoy a bit like some of the big bright LEDs on other external hard drives.
ST310005EXA101-RK is 7200 RPM drive and comes with its own power-supply adapter which must be used to power-up this drive. It is not a portable drive and is not USB-bus powered.
This ST310005EXA101-RK drive doesn't come pre-loaded with any backup/encryption software. However it does come up with a small .exe file which when run takes you to Seagate's product registration page where it automatically fills the Drive Serial Number, so you just enter your name/email and register the product. I like registering as it helps locating the details of the drive in case you have to call customer service for repair/replace under manufacturer's warranty (which is 2 years for this drive). You can altogether not run it at all if you don't want to register.
Everytime I plug in this ST310005EXA101-RK, it makes a large clicking sound once but after that it goes quiet while running. I plugged it into a Macbook Pro and created 2 partitions, one for MAC (HFS) and other for Windows (NTFS). I then used Time-Machine software that came with my Macbook to take a backup on MAC partition. It was quite smooth with no issues. I then unplugged the drive and connected to a Windows 7 laptop and it recognized the 2 partitions immediately, HFS being Read-Only and NTFS being Read-write. I then took my Windows 7 backup using in-built Windows backup software and it also went quite smooth.
So far no issues with the drive. It does tend to attract fingerpints/dust on its shiny surface since I removed the cellophane from it.
