THX OP.... A great deal IMO.... came up with free shipping to Massachusetts. I am not an engineer and may be wrong but from what I understand this drive has the fastest seek time of any drive ever made, 3.6ms....
1) I once had an HD 80pin-68pin adapter and had no issues with it whatsoever. Perhaps someone else can reply with known issues... one thing I can think of is that you will need to have an extra inch or two of depth (not sure exactly how deep they are) in order to accomodate the adapter...
2) Hypermicro has the
same drive new for $269, this price has remained constant for the last year or so. The warranty on the new drive is also just 1 year according to Hypermicro site. As far as I remember, it used to come with a longer warranty (5 years?)
3) I have had my OS on an OEM Compaq rebadged Fujitsu MAM3184MP 18GB 68pin Ultra-160 SCSI 15,000RPM Hard Drive or over a year and have had no issues with it. It really seemed new to me and I imagine it was a system pull from a Compaq PC that never sold. I paid $89 shipped for it at the time and that was the best deal that I had seen after keeping an eye out for a long time. However, I do realize that factory recertified is always a crap shoot, but if you do need to RMA your drive....
4) Hypermicro has a
9.42 Lifetime Rating on Reseller Ratings. I personally can attest to having had an excellent relationship with them.... I once had to exchange a drive that I ordered advertently. I spoke with a truly caring human being on the phone who handled the whole thing for me... He was eager to mention that shipping is always free when you upgrade....
5) The Anandtech effect seems to be occuring... they have sold about 100 of these over the last two and a half days and last time I checked they only had 28 left.