martytdx's Full Review: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1-TB 1 TB SAT...
5 years ago, a 150GB hard drive seemed like a HUGE drive that would be hard to fill up. Then came my 300GB hard drive backed up by a 250GB one. And a 500GB external hard drive. I never thought it would happen - I didn't think Iwould be able to fill up over 1TB of memory. But it's amazing how an active photography habit using a 10MP D200 camera can quickly add up and fill up my drives. So, I went out in search of a new drive. I'd been wanting one for a while anyway since one of my drives (my 250GB) was acting wonky and I was afraid to put anything else on it.
So, I went out looking for a new drive. I've always had great luck with Seagate drives (unlike my poor record with Maxtor), so that was naturally my first choice. I looked at both the 1TB and the 1.5TB internal SATA drives, but saw some bad reviews about the 1.5TB and decided to go for the smaller size.
● 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 ● A terabyte. I remember an old Star Trek talking about a hard drive having 5TB of memory, and that being a significant amount - in the 23rd century. Hmm, I think we might have leap-frogged that timeline. But for many, a terabyte might be hard to understand - so to explain: -- 1 trillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) -- it's 1,000,000 MB, or 1,000GB -- it's enough to hold 85,000 10MP images -- it's enough to hold about 143,000 MP3 files (6.3MB average)
Well, actually, that's what fits on the 900GB or so that remains after the installation software and that annoying Windows glitch that rounds up bit size, resulting in about 9% reduction in drive size. Still, 900-923GB is a lot of space.
● Okay, it's got space - got it ● Okay - now that we've established that, how does it work. Well - very well. With a 7200rpm drive and a blazing 3.0GB/s transfer rate, it quickly accesses and delivers the data to you. While I had a 7200rpm drive before, the transfer rate was was much slower. And having the space is a great boon, since it effectively tripled my storage in one drive. The drive has a 32MB cache to give even faster access to smaller files.
Even better, this drive is 'greener' than older drives, only taking up 8.0 watts while idling and meeting RoHS environmental requirements.
● Installation ● The drive itself is simple to install - either remove your old drive or simply put this one into the extra bay in your computer, hook up the power and data cables (the drive requires an internal SATA connection). Once installed (it took about 10 minutes), you start the computer up. My wife bought a similar drive and Windows detected it and added it automatically, but I had to use Seagate's DiskWizard software to get Windows to recognize the drive (see more about the software below). Strangely, my drive from Amazon.com came without the disc and I had to use an older version I had. But once the software was installed, however, Windows quickly recognized the drive and gave me full access.
● DiscWizard ● The DiscWizard software is pretty basic - it gets Windows to recognize the drives larger than 139GB, and then lets you set up the drive automatically, or create partitions to create multiple 'drives' (which I do to segment the type of content - videos vs. pictures vs. music). The entire process took about 5 minutes.
● More Features ● While I won't use these features, this drive is set up to be accepted in RAID 1 or 0 systems, as long as there are <3 drives on the one system). However, I have read some problems with some of the larger Seagate drives in RAID set-ups.
● Final Thoughts ● I know that it won't be too terribly long before I'll be in the market for another drive, but hopefully my new Seagate drive will hold me over for a while. Large size, speed and an ease of installation make this a good buy; adding in the low wattage it uses while idling and the fact that, like all Seagate drives, it comes with a 5-year limited warranty, and it's a great buy.
● Specifications ● Model Number: ST31000340AS Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s Cache: 32 MBytes Capacity: 1 TB Guaranteed Sectors: 1,953,525,168
PHYSICAL Height (max): 26.1 mm (1.028 inches) Width (max): 101.6 mm (4.000 inches) Length (max): 146.99 mm (5.787 inches) Weight (typical): 677 grams (1.493 pounds)
PERFORMANCE Spindle Speed: 7,200 rpm Average latency: 4.16 msec Random read seek time: <8.5 msec Random write seek time: <9.5 msec
RELIABILITY Annual Failure Rate: 0.34% Warranty: 5 year limited warranty
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