An Outstanding Parallel Interface large Hard Drive

This 16 MB cache 320 GB parallel ATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (ST3320620A) OEM hard drive would make an ideal addition to your pre-series ATA computer as additional storage or as the main drive. It also makes an excellent replacement drive for your external USB mass storage drivesystem. In order to use the full size as a single petition, your computer or operating system must support drives larger than 137 GB (48-bit LBA). Otherwise, you would have to split it into two petitions smaller than 137 GB each. I ran a benchmark using HD Tune 2.10 on this hard drive and the disk access speed starts at around 72 MB/second and ends at around 30 MB/second. . Being an OEM hard drive, it does not come with any cloning/copying software, cables or screws. The 15 day trial version of Acronis Migrate Easy 7 software can be downloaded from Seagate's website for cloning or copying your stuff from the old hard drive to the new one. For copying the boot drive of Windows XP, this program works extremely well. From my experience, I found this program to be extremely good. Unlike some cloning programs supplied by the other hard drive companies, after cloning some of the programs may not work and require to be reinstall. With this one, everything works like when it was still on the original drive on most computers except for a Dell Dimension 8200 which I try to clone and failed. The new drive wasn't bootable after cloning. That Dell Computer bios setting has to be set to turn on the second drive whenever you insert another drive and set to turn off when you take off a second drive otherwise it will not even post when turned on. Somehow, that computer bios won't even allow cloning or selective booting when you try to install multiple operating systems. When cloning the boot drive, the program will restart your computer and then commence cloning. When it's finished it will shut down the computer automatically so you can remove the old hard drive and reconfigure the new drive to work as the new boot drive. To avoid naming conflicts, be sure to leave out the old drive and rename the new drive before shutting down and reinserting the old drive if desire. After booting up with the new drive, you have to rename your new hard drive because it also copies the old hard drive's name. Computer restart is not necessary when configuring a hard drive to use as storage as in my case. It will formats and configure while Windows is active. I also run HDD Health and it does not show any bad sections or problems. The default jumper setting on this hard drive is set for cable select. This is a 10 series Seagate Barracuda hard drive with perpendicular recording. It comes in both parallel ATA 100 and SATA interfaces. It is designed to be very quiet. Although I find this drive to be as quiet as I should expect of a modern hard drive. I can barely hear it other than a very slight ticking sound when the drive is accessing. Seagate is discontinuing the manufacture of parallel interface hard drives soon in favor of the series ATA only. All of the new motherboards already come with series ATA interfaces. As of right now, both interfaces are about the same price. In the future, no doubt prices will go up for parallel interface hard drives.

This Seagate drive is consist of two platters and four heads with a 16 MB cache memory with a density of 160 GB per platter. The warranty term for this drive is five years from the date of manufacture. You can check the warranty of the drive by logging in to http://support.seagate.com/customer/warranty_validation.jsp . There you can type in your model numbers and serial numbers to find out when your warranty will then expires. In my case, my warranty will expire in September 27, 2012 for this particular drive. If your drive should fail within the warranty period Seagate will replace the drive with a identical or comparable factory refurbished one as a replacement. I don't really like the idea of using a refurbished hard drive. I hope, my drive will outlive the warranty term. I am betting on Seagate's reputation on reliability. Hard drives are generally refurbished by software only on a computer. It's way too expensive to take a hard drive apart in a clean room to repair it. It would end up costing more than the hard drive worth as new. It is done by simply remapping the drive by reprogramming. It tells the firmware not to use a certain section on the disk that is known to be bad and then reset the S.M.A.R.T.output back to zero. For all practical purposes like a new hard drive with the clock set back to zero as well as no more errors. The defects are still there, it just that it's being skipped over and masked. Even with a brand-new high quality hard drive, more than likely comes with a few defective sections on the disk that requires the firmware to label as unusable and required to remap. Hard drives are designed with quite a few spare sections to be used to replace bad sections as they occur. Because of this, unless there an ever growing defective sections. The hard drive size doesn't shrink at all. The problem with this is disk access speed is much lower when defective sections grows. So for maximum access speed and performance, it is best to stick with a drive with as few as possible defective sections. By the way, my hard drive is manufactured in Malaysia instead of Singapore. Until recently, I've noticed practically all desktop hard drives were manufacture in Singapore. I'v paid a total of $82 plus California's sales tax and $6.50 shipping at zipzoomfly.com for a grand total about $95.

I will update this review as I learn more about how well this Seagate hard drive performs.

Specifications
320 GB1

Model Number ST3320620A
Interface
Ultra ATA/100

Performance
Transfer Rate, Max Ext (MB/s) 100
Cache (MB) 16
Average Latency (msec) 4.16
Spindle Speed (RPM) 7200

Configuration/Organization
Heads/Disks2 4/2
Bytes per Sector 512
Reliability/Data integrity
Contact Start-Stops 50,000
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read 1 per 1014
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF, hours) 700,000
Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) 0.34%
Limited Warranty (years) 5

Power Management
+12 VDC +/㪢% (amps peak) 2.8
Power Management (watts)
Seek Avg 12.6
Operating Avg 13.0
Idle Avg 9.3

Environmental
Temperature, Operating (°C) 0 to 60
Temperature, Nonoperating (°C) - 40 to 70
Shock, Operating: 2 msec (Gs) 68
Shock, Nonoperating: 1 msec (Gs) 350
Acoustics, Idle (bels—sound power) 2.50
Acoustics, Seek (bels—sound power) 3.00
Physical
Height (in/mm) 1.028/26.1
1.028/26.1
Width (in/mm) 4.000/101.6
Depth (in/mm) 5.787/146.99
Weight (lb/kg) 1.4/635