EARLY BARRACUDA- BRING ON THE POWER OF ATA V! (Seagate Barracuda ATA V 60 GB)

Member Name: monkey_daz

Product:	Seagate Barracuda ATA V 60 GB
Date:	25/06/09 (6 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Impressive Reliability. Quiet operation.

Disadvantages: Low capacity and speed compared to modern drives.

This is the oldest hard drive in my house and houses the operating system on what I call my "work" PC. It replaced a faulty IBM one, which itself was replacing a faulty Maxtor one. They both lasted a few weeks, this has lasted 7 years so far. If you are looking to buy one of these I can recommend them, even second hand I wouldn't expect anything to be wrong with one of these. They can take a beating.


SEAGATE "SEAL":

The first thing I noticed about it when I originally got it was the Seagate Seal. This is a large "sticker" that covers the electronics on the underside of the hard drive. I had never seen this on any hard drive before and so I knew immediately that Seagate were going to be different. The Seagate software for setting up hard drives was also the first time I had been able to format a drive in about 5 seconds so this was an immense bonus.


SPEED:

For an IDE hard drive it's fast-ish. I think the IBM DeskStar I had was the fastest ever, but that didn't work for long so overall this one has an almost infinitely better average speed! It does support ATA V so will give a bit more speed than older or lesser rated ATA IV drives.


NOISE:

In terms of noise it's not too bad either, maybe that's the Seagate Seal coming into play again here, but compared to much newer drives like Samsung's Spinpoint's and indeed Seagate's SATA drives it is about twice as loud I would say. This is still very quiet compared to a lot of hard drives though, for example it's noticeably quieter than a Western Digital Raptor SATA 37GB.


CAPACITY:

The storage size of 60 GB is perfect for an operating system and installation of software. This is how I use it with another 320GB hard drive to store all my files and backups from other computers. That's a good chunk of the "work" this PC does nowadays, backing up, newer computers. 2MB buffer is small, comparatively, to modern drives but bearing in mind this is only 60GB it's not too bad.


CONCLUSION:

Overall, you can't really go wrong with this one and I have no reason to suspect that it won't last another 7 years! It has other features like SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which wasn't on all hard drives back then like it is more or less now. There are other clever technological clever things it does but you can read about those in the dooyoo description above.

Summary: When this came out it was one of the best. It's reliable- so second hand it represents a bargain!

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