Mainstream hard drive with great performance

In the current market 320 GB hard drives have a very good cost to storage space ratio and is widely installed on many new computer systems. The Seagate Barracuda 320GB hard drive presents a very good cost per GB ratio and it's performance is very good for a 7200RPM hard drive.

This hard drive comes with a SATA port and a SATA power port but does not come with a legacy power port. This is not usually a problem on new systems with modern power supplies, but this may be a problem for aging systems that have SATA interface but not SATA power. Fortunately it comes with a Legacy to SATA power converter so even people with aging computers don't have to fret.

In sequential reading and writing tests, the Seagate hard drive is on the average 10MB/sec faster than an comparable Western Digital Caviar 3200KS hard drive. Random access time for the seagate hard drive average around 12.5ms while the Western Digital is about 13.2ms. Not a huge difference. This slight performance increase also comes with a cost of slightly increased noise. The seagate hard drive under load is about 57 decibels, while the western digital being about 52 decibels. At idle the noise is about the same at around 45. Idle temperatures are also comparable at 30C for both hard drives. Under load the seagate reaches 37C while the Western digital drive stays at 35C after 5 hours. These temperatures represent settings where an 120mm fan is blowing on it constantly. The CPU overhead for the seagate drive is very low, hovering around 0.4% while the western digital drive hovers at around 0.9%. After torture testing the drive for 24 hours by continuously running heavy random I/O operations, the drive's S.M.A.R.T reported zero read or write errors. These are very good results indeed!

Overall for the price I paid this has been a very reliable drive with a great performance to boot.