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Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB
by safari004
I bought this hard drive for my new PC. As I wanted alot of storage space, so, I bought this hard drive. I was in need of such high storage capacity because I do some graphics stuff and also I wanted some space for my movie collection.
This hard drive has a spindle speed of 7200 rpm, which is common to other Seagate Barracuda ... hard drives. This is the mainly used speed for a hard drive now adays.
This hard drive supports SATA-300 interface. Due to this it can transfer data at a very high speed. It also has a cache buffer of 16 MB, which helps in enhancing its performance. It support Native Command Queuing, which is mainly useful in server systems.
This hard drive boosts excellent seek time and transfer rates. It heats up a bit, so, proper air cooling is necessary. Noise is not a problem with this hard drive.
One thing to notice is that it is a little expensive, so, you will have to save queit a bit before buying this hard drive.
If price is not a problem, I recommend this hard drive for potential buyers.
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Seagate ST3120022A Barracuda
by isvikthere
---Introduction---- Recently I wrote a comment on the IBM Deskstar 75GXP series of harddrives to be found here : http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/computers/hard_disk_drives/ibm_deskstar_75gxp/_review/ 423529/ You can either read it or not but if you do you'll understand that currently I am quite sensitive when it comes to ... buying harddrives.
So this time my bad experiences with the IBMs made me turn to another manufacturer to satisfy my need for bigger a bigger harddrive. Especially that since the purchase of my Leadtek TV capturecard I am using my PC as a digital videorecorder and therefore my needs for more storage capacity have grown considerably.
And if this review turns into a bit of a rant it can only be attributed to the above mentionned sensitivity, which is helped in no way by the fact that only last monday my "replacement" IBM DTLA307045 had in its turn to be sent off after only nine months of dubious duty and I have every chance of receiving the exact same type of "re-serviced useable part" under IBM's warranty policy.
--- Now Why the Seagate ST3120022A Barracuda ? ---
For no particular reason really, only that I have bought several Seagates in the past and that when you search for comments on it on the web, on the whole Seagate seems to have a reasonable general trackrecord when it comes to reliability.
Also with the Seagates I myself never (and i really mean never) had the kind of nightmare experiences the IBM Deathstars made me go through.
The choice of the 120Gb capacity was based solely on the fact that at my usual dealer's it seemed to be size of harddrive that offered the best value for money.
Quick technical overview :
Theoretical storage capacity : 120Gigabytes
Real world storage capacity (formatted under NTFS) : 111,8 gigabytes (*)
Spindle Speed : 7200 rounds per minute
Cache buffer : 2 megabytes
Average
access times : seek 8.5milliseconds /read 8.5 milliseconds /write 9.5
milliseconds
Interface : Ultra ATA/100
Of course I'm fully aware that is not the best (in terms of performance) Seagate harddrive money can buy today, in its catalogue Seagate has drives of much higher specifications on
offer. This Seagate ST3120022A Barracuda is member of the Barracuda 7200.7 family of harddrives, which is really their budget line. Besides that there is also the Barracuda ATA V - series with ATA133 interface and 8 megabytes of cache and even further up the scale there are the Cheetahs.
But since my misadventures with the IBMs, which were at the time highly praised in the press for their top performance, I think I have learned my lesson and I simply no longer care about that. I am already quite satisfied settling for just plain "good" performance if it will increase my chances of not having to say bye bye to my precious data at the next hiccup.
I've also now learned the hard way that a harddrive product can only really be evaluated over a longer period of time, let's say up to and over a year of regular use. Only then you can start claiming that a harddrive is good. Therefore I was fairly angry when I recently saw Tomshardware.com praising the latest Hitachi Deskstar product skyhigh. Exactly what happened now three years ago with the 75GXP series and see where that got me.
Also, in the meantime, all major harddrive manufacturers have reduced the warranty period for all but their topmodels from three to just one year (!). This gives you really something to think about as I interpret this as they themselves having litle confidence in their new products. Maybe it is a questionof murderous competition : price per gigabyte seems to be tumpbling down at an astonishing rate. But from us the consumer's point of view it is a move that inspires very litle reassurance indeed.
---Conclusion---
Therefore I will be very careful in rating this Seagate product : I'll start by giving it just three stars since it works as expected, it is quite silent in operation (although this is hard to evaluate when installed in today's noisy high performance PCs) and hasn't reported any errors yet. With Seagate's own installation software, called "DiscWizard", freely downloadable from the Seagate website, installing the harddrive in a new (via a bootdiskette) or adding it to an existing system (via an application running under Windows) is a breeze. Much much easier than when you have to call upon Microsoft's own akward and antiquated fdisk programme.
(*) Note : when it comes to storage capacity we are being tricked (and swallowing it) in the same way as with CRT Monitors, where a 17 inch monitor never gave you 17 inches of viewable surface - you were lucky if you got 16 !- such is the fact that in harddrives the mentionned capacity is never the real amount of data you can store. After formatting one of today's large capacity drives several gigabytes seem to have vanished into thin air. Or have they been sacrificed on the altar of the Hardware Gods ?
Cheers,
Vik
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Seagate ST312024A Barracuda V 120 GB 8MB
by nlee
My current computer is a low grade Pentium 3 computer with a 450mhz processor that I had bought in some time in 1998. Compared to today's standards with most computers having a processing speed way over 1Ghz, I'd say my computer is slowly climbing its way to the scrap heap, closely following my older P90 computer. Of ... course, with such sluggish processing power as this, my computer also had a hard drive that matched the inadequacy of my processor compared to modern computing "needs". At the time, I was left with only a 12Gb hard drive in which to fill up with programs, documents, elaborate pictures and other such junk. This was fine by me as games were not so hard drive space hungry and modem connections only trickled a few bytes of information.
Then the computer revolution turned its wheels and all of a sudden, I find my computer obsolete...
My brain first started nagging me about getting a newer computer when I had my measly modem connection upgraded to a broadband cable connection. Lucky me! Streaming video and demo programs was gushing through the broadband pipeline at alarming rates but the fun was short-lived when I kept having messages warning me that any more downloads would overload my hard drive and potentially cause a nasty explosion of 1s and 0s. (That's a binary joke, sorry)
But alas, my wallet was too empty to fulfil the dream of a new computer and so my last resort was a new hard drive, which works out as much, much cheaper than a complete new system. I was sceptical at first with compatibility issues but through some research, had found that it shouldn't be a problem as long as I buy an IDE hard drive and not an SCSI. The difference between these is rate of data transfer, with SCSI being the faster but much more expensive option. Oh, and also make sure that you have a free bay inside your computer to fit the extra drive into.
Then came the day when I had to search frantically for
that new hard drive. I came across a Seagate Barracuda because a friend had recommended Seagate drives. Apparently they're more reliable and quite silent too so off I went to dabs.com (an online computer hardware store) to purchase one.
A few days passed and a silvery metal box arrived through the post in a plain plastic sleeve with no instruction manual, but the invoice told me it was a Seagate Barracuda hard drive. I have had no prior experience with opening computers and no idea how the darn things worked. But there I was armed with a screwdriver and torch, amateurly taking apart my computer. It was really rather easy to configure the drive as there was a rather helpful diagram at the back of the hard drive unit to show how it should be set to activate primary or slave mode. A simple bent paperclip was all that was required to remove the jumper from the hard drive and I was all set to go.
I pieced my computer back up again, prayed, then turned on the switch and was quite surprised to see the computer "auto-detecting" the drive and was able to configure and format it automatically. What luck! I am now a proud owner of a hard drive that is ten times spaceier than my last one. It's also incredibly silent, producing only minor whirring noises when a program is being accessed on it. This is a major improvement and I can tell, because I've been raised with computers having dolphins inside of them, clicking like mad when I try to access the tiniest things. I'm sure the clicking almost drove me insane once... but such clicking is non-existent in this superb Barracuda hard drive.
The hard drive had cost me roughly £120 and a little bit of my time and sweat but it's worth every penny. (Works out to around £1 per 1GB.) It's been an absolute dream as I can now download whatever bits of necessary junk I want from the Internet without worrying over the space it will fill up. In fact, only half of my drive is filled
at this moment, but I'm pretty sure I'll find things to fill it all up with. After all, as a great computer sales guy had told me, "You can never have too much hard drive space. You'll think it's fine now but you'll want more and more." It's surprising to see that after many months of owning the hard drive, I have had no problems with it especially as I have seen my friends rip out their hair in frustration in seeing their hard drives fail them after a few weeks.
Overall, an excellent product that I would recommend to anyone in dire need of hard disk space.
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