The future will decide.

Why the Seagate ST3120022A Barracuda ?

For no particular reason really, only that over the last three years I had some serious problems with two IBM (now Hitachi) harddrives of the GXP series. And after those I bought a 40GB Western Digital drive which hasn't given me any hassle yet.

But since my usual reseller this time had no Western Digital drives on hand I turned to Seagate. I have bought several Seagates in the past and when you search for comments on it on the web, on the whole Seagate seems to have a very reasonable general trackrecord when it comes to reliability. This is confirmed by my own Seagates from which I never experienced any reliability problems. I've got an 8 gigabyte model that is over four years old now and still going strong.

The choice of the 120gb capacity was based solely on the fact that at my usual dealer's it seemed to be size of harddrive that offered the best value for money. And since I acquired a good TV-capture card last summer and now use my PC as a digital videorecorder I need all the storage I can lay my hands on.

Quick technical overview :

Theoretical storage capacity : 120gigabytes
Real world storage capacity (formatted under ntfs) : 111,8 gigabytes (*)
Spindle speed : 7200 rounds per minute
Cache buffer : 2 megabytes
Average access times :
seek 8.5milliseconds
read 8.5 milliseconds
write 9.5 milliseconds
Interface : Ultra ATA/100

Of course I'm fully aware that is not the best (in terms of performance) Seagate harddrive money can buy today, in its catalogue Seagate has drives of much higher specifications on offer. This Seagate ST3120022A Barracuda is member of the Barracuda 7200.7 family of harddrives, which is really their budget line. Besides that there is also the Barracuda ATA V - series with ATA133 interface and 8 megabytes of cache and even further up the scale there are the Cheetahs.


But since my misadventures with the IBMs, which were at the time highly praised in the press for their top performance, I think I have learned my lesson and I simply no longer care about plain speed. I am already quite satisfied settling for just plain "good" or even decent performance if it will increase my chances of not having to say bye bye to my precious data at the next hiccup.

I've also now learned the hard way, in spite of what all other hardware reviewers have to say about it, that a harddrive product can only really be evaluated over a longer period of time, let's say up to and over a year of regular use. Only then you can start claiming that a harddrive is good and reliable. Therefore I was fairly angry when I recently saw Tomshardware.com praising yet again the latest Hitachi Deskstar product skyhigh, a praise purely based on performance determined by some synthetic benchmarks. Exactly what happened now three years ago with the IBM 75GXP series and see where that got me.

Also, in the meantime, all major harddrive manufacturers have reduced the warranty period for all but their topmodels from three to just one year (!). This gives you really something to think about as I interpret this as they themselves having little confidence in their new products. Maybe it is a question of murderous competition : price per gigabyte seems to be tumbling down at an astonishing rate, especially for the IDE-drives that are being fased out in favor of the Serial ATA harddrives. But from ours, the consumer's point of view it is a move that inspires very little reassurance indeed.

All in all, unlike some people, I'm not a diehard fan of one brand of harddrives above all others. All I want from them is that they work as can be expected and preferably for as long as possible. As none of my PCs are on a 24/24 and 7/7 shift and my PC towers are decently ventilated with at least two coolers none of my harddrives are submitted to undue stress and that is why I expect them to perform their duties flawlessly. I'm not being unreasonable here, am I ?

Conclusion

Therefore I will be very careful in rating this Seagate product : I'll start by giving it just three stars since it works as expected, it is quite silent in operation (although this is hard to evaluate when installed in today's noisy high performance PCs) and hasn't reported any errors yet. With Seagate's own installation software, called "DiscWizard", freely downloadable from the Seagate website, installing the harddrive in a new (via a bootdiskette) or adding it to an existing system (via a Windows version of the same DiscWizard application) is a breeze. Much much easier than when you have to call upon Microsoft's own akward and antiquated fdisk programme.



(*) Note : when it comes to storage capacity we are being tricked (and swallowing it) in the same way as with CRT Monitors, where a 17 inch monitor never gave you 17 inches of viewable surface - you were lucky if you got 16 !- such is the fact that in harddrives the mentionned capacity is never the real amount of data you can store. After formatting one of today's large capacity drives several gigabytes seem to have vanished into thin air. Probably they have been sacrificed to appease the Hardware Gods ? For those of you that have doubts about this phenomenon : I did use Seagate's own installation tool to format the drive for NTFS, the filesystem used by WindowsNT, 2000 and XP.

Cheers,
Vik