Shocker

Well, I thought it was the fact that they (Caviar Green drives) had an audible tone of 90Hz, whereas 7200RPM drives have a tone of 120Hz.

Sounds like what Western Digital did with Caviar Green (in reality being 5400RPM though Western Digital held claim to them "spinning up" or "down" to different RPM speeds so as to "save" power).

Oh, yeah, close enough. :P

I said 101.3GB because I see the drive, formatted in Windows, as having 111GB available.

How did you consume 101.3GB so quickly?

No errors in S.M.A.R.T., though? I'd say it's a good drive if it lasted that long with no errors, though it still depends on how many power cycles it has as well. And well, at least it isn't limited to PIO mode. As for Compaq, I wouldn't rail them on that much... their older power supplies at least were quality and overbuilt units.

I don't think they can keep the error rate down with ever increasing TBs, at least not with perpendicular recording...

I find that user votes don't really mean anything... anyone can just submit any rating whether in earnest or not. And it says the ST380011A has 2MB of cache, which to me is close enough:

http://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinf...TE%20ST380011A

Obviously, there are mistakes, but it could be worse.

The HDD sentinel database says it's only 485 grams, so no surprise.

I don't mind noise so much but if I had to choose between "silent" and "loud", I'd go with silent, though sometimes with noisier drives I find it helps that they give me audible portendings of failure.