yoshimato's Full Review: Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive
When I upgraded my whole system, it's time for a new drive. The working drives still in my possession are of capacity 128 MB, 512 MB, 4 GB and now 40 GB. Interestingly, all the drives are Seagate except for the 4GB Maxtor Diamond Max. But that was probably a mistake. It was too noisy and drove me nuts. I got a Maxtor because Seagate used to be one of the fastest, but not anymore. However, I don't know how Maxtor got away with this. Drives in corporate PC's are virtually silent at two feet away, when idle. They only cry 'break break break' when reading or writing data. You have to put your ears next to the PC to hear the drive noise when idle. For home PC's, it's silly to have a 5.1 speaker Dolby Digital when the silly Maxtor is spinning noisily at all times beside you. And normally the PC box is closer to the user at home than at work.
But the drives in complete systems can afford to be more quiet because they are not the fastest – you don't even know the spec. The upgrade or OEM market drives have to compete on the spec and hence speed. They got bigger, faster, but also noisier. The Barracuda idle noise power is 2.1 bels, while a 40 GB Maxtor is 3.1 bels. You may think 1 bel doesn't matter much, but that's critical. 1 bel is 10 decibel. 3 decibel is double the physical noise power! 1 bel is about 10 times the physical noise power! Though human perception does not correlate directly with the physical noise power. But I can tell you this, I'm very happy with the Barracuda by my side, but the old Maxtor drove me nuts, so much so that I hate to go near my computer. Looking across the board, the fastest drives, and not so fast drives are around 3 bels. So the Barracuda is naturally my choice, and the spec isn't that inferior.
Things to look for in a drive – capacity
The first decision is the capacity. For me, 10 GB at work is good enough with a lot of private stuff. Minimum for me will be 20 GB. Again my price/performance analysis shows that 40 GB gives you most bang for the buck. At the time, you don't pay much more from going from 20 to 40 GB, but a lot from 40 to 60 or 80. A year on, the optimum point seems to be 80 GB. I have been using only 20 MB partition until recently I venture into DVD. Each DVD is 5 GB but most movies are double layered with 9 GB. If you are doing anything with DVD movies, you need at least 10 GB spare disk space to store a Hollywood style movie. Double that at 20 GB is a good idea – you can have two movies on hard drive, or one copy as files, plus one copy as a DVD disc image so you can test it as though it is already burnt into a DVD disc. So 40 GB works for me nicely and for a long time to come. If that's not enough, I can shift 5 GB of rarely used things onto a DVD disc at down to 60 cents each for write once discs. For that price I won't even consider re-writable discs – why you want to rewrite when it's cheaper to throw away and write another one? But of course RW disc has their advantages, a little bit more environment friendly, and you don't have to change discs.
The case against bigger drives is that because of current technology limitations, they are more expensive per GB, and not any faster, usually slower, and noisier. Note that the Barracuda 80 GB has a noise level of 2.4 bel, which is equal to the noise power of two 40 GB added together. And they are made just like that, slapping two 40 GB disc into one drive. But nowadays you don't pay much more for 80 GB, but that was different a year ago.
Another capacity consideration is RAID, if your system or motherboard supports it. For reliability, you buy two 40 GB drives with a total capacity of only 40 GB. You still got all the data when any one of them fails. But rarely people use this – I never had hard disc failure except on an ancient drive. Another RAID configuration is to buy two 40 GB and you have about 80 GB capacity. The advantage is that it's faster than a single 80 GB drive rated at the same speed if that's available. The catch is that a single 80 GB at the same speed, if that's available at the time, is always cheaper than two 40 GB. If any one disc fails you lost data in both (in simple terms). You also get double the noise power and twice the power consumption for 2 drives. You may not get twice of everything for a single 80 GB drive. But power consumption translates into heat, which is the number one enemy of PC's. RAID is not a very good idea for a desktop system. For the foot print you can afford, you want to keep the room in your PC as spacious as possible, to minimize the amount of hardware, which generates heat, and block air circulation. That will include throwing away the analog modem card when you have cable modem, don't use any old hard drives even you have a few GB in them. I use to install old tape drives on new PCs just because they are still working, but not anymore. Someday I'll pull out the floppy drives as well but that would leave a hole in front. As a matter of principle, I laugh when I saw people buying a fast DVD burner PLUS a super fast CD burner. I wouldn't go through that much RAID trouble and pay more to gain speed, which affects little for desktop use.
Things to look for in a drive – speed
The bottle neck is the interface. Barracuda uses ultra ATA/100, which is 100 Mbyte/sec. There are faster (and more expensive) desktop drives - ATA/133. You can only sustain the interface speed, for example, when loading a large program or file, and doing very little else. So at 100 MByte per sec, anything is the blink of an eye. If you think you blinks faster than the rest of us, by all means go for ATA/133.
Starting from the beginning of the performance chain, the Barracuda disc spins at 7200 RPM, the data transfers from the disc to buffer at 555 Mbit/sec, which is 555/8 Mbyte/sec, significantly less than the interface rate. You can only sustain this rate if the data is continuous as in a big file. The data are collected in a 2 MB buffer and transfer to the PC at the interface speed only when the PC is ready. The other performance is when the PC tell the drive to find a file, the head moves, and the drive response at an average delay of 4.16 msec. Combined with the spin speed, the average time for finding a file is 9 msec, depending where the file is on the disc. Overall the Barracuda is not the top performer, but close to top of the class. But for peace and quiet, a little bit slower is a good price to pay.
Other things to look for in a drive
The Barracuda boost a SoftSonic motor and SeaShield technology to achieve an industrial leading 2.1 bel. Sure you don't have the brain penetrating spinning noise when idle as in the old Maxtor, but the SeaShield is probably sufficient foam around the drive to cushion the vibration noise and damping the noise reaching outside.
To minimize the possibility of overheating, especially in cramped little cases, the power consumption when idle is something to compare. If you leave the PC all the time, and let it goes to standby automatically, the power consumption during standby is something to compare. The lower the consumption, the easier it is to dissipate the heat when it's left on standby, so you can leave it on standby permanently – but I won't do that.
Most motherboards has up to 3 fans. One for the Pentium, one for motherboard near memory, and one for the cards. The fans are also good to keep the heat from the drive bays. The fan that comes with the Pentium is virtually silent, and it should for the price. I brought an extra fan for a few dollar, it is quiet but I can hear it when I'm sitting in front, and it seems to be noisier than the Barracuda. I disconnected the extra fan and leave only the Pentium fan on. If you don't keep the heat low, you should put more fan in, though quiet fans cost more than a few dollars.
The package
My drive is of course OEM, that means a bare drive with nothing else. You don't need any driver and software. Any software available for retail are utilities that you can do without. If anything I want to skip warranty, it will be hard drive, especially Seagate, I have a whole line of working Seagate drives to show for it. I paid $83 on Jan 2002 , plus tax and shipping.
The specification according to Seagate
This is included for your convenience.
Seagate s Barracuda ATA IV disc drives deliver 7,200-RPM performance for desktops and entry-level ATA servers, with capacities up to 80 Gbytes. The pr...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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