A Huge Amount Of Storage Space Improved Perpendicular Recording SATA Hard Drive
Written: Jul 17 '09 (Updated Nov 12 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: A very spacious and fast hard drive for the money also very quiet
Cons: Only three years warranty and manufactured in China and not in Singapore
The Bottom Line: I would highly recommend this hard drive you want one that's fast and quiet. The only negative have to say about this product is the reduced warranty period.
peterdmar's Full Review: Seagate ST31000528AS 1 TB SATA Hard Drive
This is my review of the OEM, Seagate 12th series ST31000528AS 1 TB Barracuda dual platter perpendicular recording very spaciousg SATA desktop hard drive. This particular drive comes with platters with density level of 500 GB each. For this model line, there are various sizes ranging from 160 GB to 1 TB in size. I've noticed particularly, larger capacity drives comes in SATA only. It's getting harder and harder to buy a hard drive in the EIDE form, because EIDE interface is on its way out. It's being phased out by most hard drive manufacturer as well as computer motherboard manufacturer. For those of you with older computers that has only EIDE interface, you may be able to connect your computer to a SATA hard drive or optical drive by using a converter card. This card is inserted in the back of the hard drive converting a SATA drive to EIDE.
I've purchased this drive to use as storage only, and petition it as one large petition of 931 GB. After installation of this drive on my computer, I use Seagate's excellent free DiscWizard software to petition the hard drive. The process is relatively quick unlike using Windows to do this. I've downloaded this hard drive utility program from the Seagate website. This is a 128 MB download and may take a while on a slower Internet connection. This program will only run if you have at least a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive on board. This hard drive utility program is really a stripped-down version of Acronis True Image Home. Partly because of this excellent utility program that I decided to stick with Seagate instead of defecting to Western Digital instead for this purchase. With this program, you can clone your old hard drive to the new under Windows or using the bootable CD R which you can make with this program. You can use this program to backup your entire hard drive as well and save it on your storage drive. If anything should happen to your Windows installation, all you would have to do is to restore it using this program in its entirety. Doing it this way, you would not have to install Windows plus updates and all of the programs that you use all over again. You can do this by just simply inserting the bootable CD, restart the computer and then follow the prompts to restore your computer. Unlike previous programs of this nature, this program does an excellent job of it. After the cloning or restore, everything appears to work fine. In my example for instance using maximum compression, I was able to save my 37 GB which was the total of my "C" Windows petition as a 19 GB file on my storage drive.
This unreliable problem with the 11th series because its firmware problems which hurt Seagate's reputation tremendously. It's also because of that, that Seagate reduced the warranty from five years to three for consumer grade hard drives. Although, the server class NS series hard drives still remains at five years warranty. According to some of the professional reviews, they reported that this hard drive is extremely fast in fact almost as fast as one running at 10,000 RPM. I tried benchmarking this hard drive using Sandra. The test result shows a starting point at 129 MB a second read speed with a drive index of 102. The test results shows that this hard drive is slightly faster than my previous 11th series Seagate hard drive. This hard drive runs extremely quiet and relatively cool with temperature not exceeding 32°C on my computer so far. This is about 5°C less when compare with my previous hard drive installed in the same position under the same conditions. This according to Hard Disk Sentinel, the hard drive monitoring program. Because of the fast read and write speed of this hard drive as well as my previous one which was the Seagate 11th series, I was able to copy my files over from my old to this one in relatively short time. The old drive will be installed on my old computer to be used as storage or as Windows drive.
My final thoughts on this hard drive: This spacious hard drive is my best one so far and hoping it to be reliable on the long term. Before considering this Seagate product, I was considering the similar Western Digital Black Edition dual platter 1 TB hard drive but changed my mind. I think this Seagate hard drive is faster than that Western Digital one. My main reason for choosing Seagate lies with its superior free hard drive installation utility program as compare with Western Digital. My only negative about Seagate lies with its shortened warranty as compare with Western Digital's five-year warranty. So far, had no problem whatsoever with this new hard drive. With the advancing hard drive technology, the hard drive manufacturers are squeezing more and more density in today's hard drives. Take this one for instance, it only has two platters yet it packs 1 TB of space and a little bit more for reserved space using perpendicular recording method. The reserved spaces are for use for the operating system to move files from bad sections of the hard drive as needed when wear and tear sets in. Yet 10 years ago most hard drive only contain no more than 7 GB using two platters of the same dimensions. Because of such high density level, I'm a little concerned whether long-term reliability is an issue on not.
Note: Sorry, because of problems on this site I had to republish this review. This review was written on July 9, 2009.
Update July 17, 2009: So far, This drive has been performing extremely well and I am quite happy with the performance. Since purchased, according to S.M.A.R.T. I have 164 hours on the clock. It hasn't produced any unusual noises or other glitches.
Update August 16, 2009: According to S.M.A.R.T. the hard drive had a minor problem, one reallocated section moved to the spare section. Other than this, the drive still works extremely well. As long as I'm not getting more new bad sections constantly it should be all right. Regardless of what, I think Seagate is slipping in quality control. Even the best of hard drives comes manufactured with bad section, that get mapped out during the first initialization process at the factory so it doesn't show up under S.M.A.R.T.. This is usually the case, why when you receive the drive it appears perfect.
Update November 12, 2009: The performance on this hard drive has remained unchanged and hasn't gotten worse. This remains as my fastest hard drive yet when it comes to storing my data. When transferring data to and from other hard drives in my system, the bottleneck has remained with my other drives. For a Seagate hard drive, this one also runs extremely cool and quiet. I now have 1,826 hours on the clock according to S.M.A.R.T.
I will update this review as I learned more about this product in the future.
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