FAST CHEAP 1000GB hard drive (well, 931GB after formatting)
Written: Dec 17 '08 (Updated Apr 18 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: 5 year warranty, fast, roomy, cheap
Cons: Doesn't come with any screws, cables, or documents
The Bottom Line: Fast, roomy, cheap, but have screws, cables, and documentation ready (also read my notes for installation if you haven't installed a drive before)
aloofyouth's Full Review: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1-TB 1 TB SAT...
==========Pros:
STORAGE PER DOLLAR:
1000GB is a lot of room, though really it's only 931GB after I formatted it as an NTFS partition. (NTFS is NT File System, which is probably what most users should format the drive to because FAT32 is an older file system that doesn't let you create files greater than 4GB in size.) Hard drive makers like to use their own definitions for things so they round up their capacity, but 931GB is pretty close to 1000MB so you aren't missing much. At the time of this writing in Dec. 2008, I paid about $100 for thd drive. That's about 10 cents per gigabyte. By the way, it took something like 1.5-2 hours to format this drive to NTFS format, so watch a movie in the meantime or something.
Note: GB = 1024MB; and MB = megabyte, something almost everyone should be able to relate to. A typical digital photograph from a compact camera would be about 2MB in size, so a 931GB hard drive could hold about 475,000 photos.
SPEED:
7200 rpm drive plus 32 MB cache = blazing fast performance. I used a program called HD Tach to test my system and put it head to head against my older 320MB Seagate drive, which was a 7200 rpm, 16 MB cache 7200.10 version from a few years ago. I also put the new Seagate 1000MB against my trusty 500MB Western Digital WD5002ABYS RE3 which is meant for server duty and should be faster than just about any regular consumer drive like the Seagates. I run an Intel E8400 dual core which is a very fast CPU for its era, so the CPU had no impact on the hard drive test results. Windows XP Pro was the operating system. I used 3 GB of DDR2-800MHz RAM.
Test Results:
Seagate 1000GB tested at 12.8ms random access (ms = millisecond) 91.4 MB/s average read (MB/s = megabytes per second) 248.6 MB/s burst speed (for brief bursts of reading/writing activity as opposed to sustained transfer of data)
Seagate 320GB tested at 13.2ms random access 67.3MB/s average read 229.8 MB/s burst
Western Digital 500GB tested at 11.9ms random access 98MB/s average speed 238.1 MB/s burst
Very impressive results. Sure, the WD drive was faster in seek time, so it would be more responsive and thus better for heavy use, but 12.8ms isn't bad, and the burst rate of the Seagate 1000GB was even better than what the WD managed.
LOW NOISE:
In other notes, the Seagate is a remarkable quiet drive. I can't really tell when it's writing or reading, and it's not like I have very loud fans or anything in my computer.
==========Cons:
Comes with no screws, drive cables, or anything else (OEM version). Just the drive. I had to use some screws from my external computer casing to screw in the hard drive, which is less than ideal. Good thing I have a sturdy computer case, else it'd just fall apart with the removal of so many screws.
Comes with no documentation. I'm not that Windows XP savvy and it took me a while to figure out that I needed to go to Control Panel, then Computer Management, then Storage, then Disk Management to tell the computer to format the hard drive. You can't plug it in, attach the cables, and then hunt for a new drive in Explorer or even Device Manager. Only later did I realize that the documentation is free online at the seagate site! http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda 7200.11/100452348b.pdf
==========Other:
Make sure you have a SATA II cable. If it doesn't say SATA II on the package, it probably is SATA I, which is still good but could limit your maximum speed somewhat. Also, remove the jumper in the back if your SATA controller doesn't auto-negotiate drive speed. See page 20 of http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda 7200.11/100452348b.pdf
Also make sure you have a SATA power cable if you need one and that your power supply unit can take the load of another drive. This drive isn't a power hog, but it doesn't have "green" power saving technologies, either. Further, make sure you have enough ventilation because hard drives don't like to run hot--it increases the chance of failure or errors.
To store and play back a limitless amount of digital media content on the web, you need a drive that provides fast and reliable data transmission.More at CircuitCity.com
To store and play back a limitless amount of digital media content on the web, you need a drive that provides fast and reliable data transmission.More at TigerDirect.com
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