Quick & Quiet Hard Drive (Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80 GB)

Member Name: aljones

Product:	Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80 GB
Date:	10/01/02 (3313 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, Quiet, Huge Capacity

Disadvantages: Not a lot

The Seagate Barracuda series of Hard Disks have been going for quite some time now, but they keep reinventing the hardware behind the name to keep it up with the times. Recently I bought a new 80Gb disk, after realising that my 10Gb one was simply not big enough for everything I wanted to install.

So off I trudged to the Novatech website, where I purchased the Seagate Barracuda 80Gb Snowman Series hard disk, for a very nice sum of £151 including delivery. I choose it because at the end of the day, I was fed up with slow, small disk drives, so was after the fastest available for the IDE/ATA interface. And this appeared to be it.

It has a sizeable 2Mb buffer, which is 4 times the size that most other drives offer. The drives spins at 7,200 rpm, with a quoted access time of 7.9ms. Again, both these seemed pretty good, as most other drives were 5,600 rpm and 8.9ms, clearly slower. I didn`t know whether I`d notice the difference, since I have no newish drives to compare it against, but I certainly can`t complain about the speed, as everything loads much more quickly than it used to (though that may be partly due to the Win2K operating system which I loaded onto it, whereas I was running Win98SE before).

Also, one of the major deciding factors in my choice was the sound level. On many of my older computers, the HDD could get very noisy when it was in high demand by the system, and didn`t want to be faced with turning my speakers up louder just to muffle the sound of my new drive. No problem with this one, as it is reportedly one of the quietest drives on the market. The final deciding factor had to be the price and the brand name. I couldn`t really find any other drives with these performance figures for a similar price, plus the drive I was replacing was a Seagate, which had run trouble free with no errors for the past three years, quite impressive when you learn that about six times a year it was hurled into the back of my car for a 60 miles t
rip between home and University, along bumpy country lanes. So I was happy with Seagate`s reliability, and so far while I have only had this one for a month, it has so far proved trouble free.

Installation wise it was fine. I had opted for the retail box version, purely because it made no difference to the price once I had shopped around. So it came with everything needed, a twin-drive IDE cable, jumpers, and a cradle for mounting the 3.5` drive in a 5.25` slot. It also came with a manual (read: sheet of paper with basic but not bad instructions for anyone with experience of installing internal hardware) and a CD and floppy disk with various `handy` pieces of software. But it simply plugged in, and was instantly recognised by the BIOS. Then it was just a simple matter of formatting it from a bootable floppy disk, and installing the OS. The only problem I had was that due to the BIOS that I have (Award v4.51), it was recognised as a 80Gb disk, rather it only saw the first 33Gb. Although I haven`t yet, some of the included software can be used to get around it, or alternatively I can upgrade the BIOS. Either way, the disk is working fine.

So all in all I can`t fault it. It was easy to install, easy to set up, and was quick and quiet once it was up and running. I`ll update if I get any problems with it, but for now I`d totally recommend this drive (or any from the same family) to anyone.

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