my dell was loaded with a hitachi/ibm deskstar 80gb 7,200RPM 2MB it was defective. so this morning i bought and installed a seagate 120GB 7,200RPM 8MB barracuda, its nice!!! in fact, this is the only company hd i'm ever gonna buy from hear on out. i just want to know what you guys think of this company?

Seagates are nice...nothing wrong with them at all. Im a WD fan myself. Dell is using Deathstar drives in their PCs...tisk tisk tisk.......

my 60 gig Seagate is very silent and reliable for over a year now. would buy one again.

before that I got smaller Maxtor and IBM ones, both were very loud when accessing.

right on, right on!!!! my seagate is impossible to hear when idle, and it makes pretty quiet accessing noises too, good shit

I only use Seagate hdds from a long time and I'm 100% happy. In my present computer I have Seagate Barracuda 160GB Serial Ata. It's very fast, quiet and no problems with it.

I also bought a Seagate 7200.7 120GB but with 2MB cache. Maybe I'll buy another as a backup for the first one. I picked Seagate because it's the leader in silent hdds and it was the cheapest in my area (72€ taxes included).

In fact, I think I'll stop burning cdrs & dvdrs in favor of hdds. Looks easier and cheap enough.

Interesting...Seagate's notebook hard drives aren't as nice as Hitachi's, in my experience. They advertise that the Momentus is very quiet, but Hitachi's new Travelstars are far quieter (although the older GNXs are quite loud).

Seagate, Maxtor, or WDC is fine!
no idea about IBM, but my cousins Dell notebook is using IBM, and its a bit noisy when access

What's important to me is the HDD can live a longer life, that's all
I have no luck with WDC, it died after a year+

Currently using Maxtor n Seagate
both of them are quiet

i've had terrible experience with WD, i have a broken drive and loud one so i RMA'd it and got a refurbished one that was nt broken but was still loud. IBM/hitachi sucked too, the drive made grinding/whining noises every once in awhile so i took it out , bought a seagate, and i'm happy as a clam

Currently, Samsung P80 series HDs seem to be the quietest HDs available. Seagate current drives (7200.7 series) are noisier than these and than previous Barracuda V and IV series, and these (specially IV ones) were the ones that were leaders in quietness. However, they are not available anymore.

I have both a Barracuda IV and a Samsung P80.
The Barracuda IV is quieter at idle, but the Samsung is more silent during seeks.
The P80 is slightly faster than the current Seagate 7200.7 in most tests I've seen, but the difference is probably not noticable.

IBM no longer makes hard drives since 75% of their business was bought by Hitachi to make Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
Their newest desktop drive, the 7K250, is both very silent and probably the fastest in its class (7200 rpm EIDE or SATA). I've read somewhere that it makes a rather loud head reseting noise every few hours however.

Seagate makes very reliable drive in my experience, but their recent warranty shenanagains have made me wary. I would only buy models that I could confirm from Seagate have a 3 year warranty.

I believe Samsung is the only remaining manufacturer that gives a 3 year warranty on all of their drives, regardless of cost. They also stress shock resistance, which my fumbling fingers appreciate.

My Dell laptop has a Hitachi HD in it. It's very quiet and disk accessing are like little scratch noises (now I hope that isn't what is really happening in there )

Seagate is without doubt a good choice.

I put 3 deathstars in my present box when I built it 2 years ago- 1 60gig for boot and 2 for raid 0. 2 years later and no problems. I bought them for the speed just before the defects hit the fan. I was worried, but no longer. I bought another 120 a couple of months back, which I've exercised mercilessly. I plan to get another in a week or so to upgrade my raid to 240 like a video box I just built for a friend. All deathstars and no trouble... though I've probably just jinxed myself.



You have a point there, though your hair mostly covers it. There's a convenience factor as well. All those tracks and movies at the click of a button.

Maxtor drives (usually?) come with their Acoustic Management turned off, set for best performance in other words. They also have two other modes, a fast quiet mode, and a quiet quiet mode. Fast quiet mode slows down the heads seek speed a bit, and quiet quiet mode slows them down even more. And they are indeed quieter. I use quiet quiet mode in my HTPC machine, and even when it's thrashing away like mad I can't hear them. In the fast quiet mode it was still audible when they were thrashing hardcore, mostly inaudible during normal use. Definitely quieter than standard mode, but for that machine I chose quiet quiet since all it does is record and playback TV and DVDs and the quieter the machine for that use the better. The Seagates are supposed to be even quieter because of the bearing design, so even less noise just from the platters spinning, and I'll probably go that way whenever that machine needs upgrades/replacements, but for now with the Maxtor 80GB and 160GB drives in quiet quiet mode I'm happy. Buncha Zalman stuff in that machine too, can't believe how quiet it is.

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor....hp?p_faqid=1200

edit - I don't know if anyone's done benchmarking, possibly, but they don't seem noticably slower to me. But given that machine's general use, I guess there isn't much to notice. Perhaps if it were my main machine I'd have a better idea. They do seek slower, so I imagine it should show some general trends in benchmarks regarding that.

Note that the 75GXP was the model series most affected.
Of the eight or nine I worked with or owned, all have failed.

The sucessor models, the 60GXPs also had problems, but they seemed to have less of them. The 120 and 180 GXPs are not known to have the high failure rate problems, nor does the newest, the 7K250.

I still have a pair of non-Hungary-assembled 30GB 75GXP drives in my box in raid0, never any problems. IIRC the ones made in Hungary were the worst. I think one reason I've been so lucky is the fan overkill in my case has kept the drives pretty cool over their lifetime, they're still going strong.

Hang on a sec? You paid loads for a Dell, and then a CRITICAL component doesn't work? Dont take that shit and go out and spend yet more of your own dosh.

What model/capacity are both drives? I'm mostly interested because of the nº of platters of each drive.

60GXP series drives had firmware fix from IBM, what fixes the reliability issues mostly. But that firmware is not needed with every 60GXP drive. Only some of them.

80GB Barracuda IV (I believe they only made one of this model - 2MB buffer) and 160GB P80 (SP1614N - ATA133 8MB buffer). Both are two platter drives, of course.
The Samsung has excellent linear transfer speeds and good seeks, though the winbench graph is ugly looking.

After my bad experiences with IBM's 4 and 5 platter drives, I refuse to buy drives with >2 platters, even in my extremely well-ventilated cases.

Got two Seagates, one Maxtor and one IBM... Guess what, the IBM HD broke down...

The Seagates are definatly the best HD:s I've ever used... One Barracuda IV and one Barracuda 7200.7. Both are excellent, although Barracuda IV seems better for inexperienced users...

I have a number of Seagate drives (two 80GB IV's, a 60GB IV, and a 120GB 7200.?). They seem to be the only consistently quiet drives on the market - meaning I've owned other brands, and they usually start quiet, but develop high-pitched whines within a few months to a year. My Seagates are all still whisper quiet while idle, but the barracudas do make some noticeable chunking noises during heavy disk operations (multi-server usenet downloading, defragging, etc) - which I didn't notice as much when i first obtained them.

I'll probably never buy another brand of harddrive again, even if the latest reviews say it's quieter than Seagate - because those reviews never keep the drive around long enough to see if it develops into a noisy beast.

One note about Serial ATA Hdds. I read some info about such drives that in most cases these hdds aren't true serial ata but they are UDMA100 drives adapted to use serial ata connector.For example Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA is an example of a such drive. They have something like Parallel ATA -> Serial ATA translator build in. Be carefull of that

Completely wrong. Seagate is the ONLY manufacturer so far that has true SATA solutions with the 7200.7 SATA series. All the others currently use SATA->PATA onboard bridge chips. Seagate proudly emphasizes this in various press releases, also because only native SATA allows the "tagged command queuing" feature that's known from SCSI.

Quite true, the 7200.7 (or some batches of it) SATA is the only currently availible "native" solution around.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of SATA controllers are not native SATA, and even some of the ones that are (Silicon Image) may not in fact support SATA command queuing (only the new SIIG 3124 does, I believe).

Note that while all command queuing does use "tags" AFAIK, and so can be called "tagged command queuing", the "Tagged Command Queuing" implementation in SCSI has a queue depth of about 256 entries, IIRC.
Command queuing in EIDE/ATA100 is known as "simple command queuing" and can be implemented in firmware and has a queue depth of either 16 or 32 (forgot), while SATA command queuing is called "Native command queuing" and effectively doubles the queue depth of the ATA variety.

So while manufacturers like to call their SATA command queuing "tagged command queuing" because it uses tags and queues, it is either NCQ (on native drives that support it - only the 7200.7 AFAIK) or simple command queuing (Raptor 740GD, Hitachi/IBM drives).

this is interesting to read about, and on most cases i have no idea wtf u guys are talking about, but good stuff Seagate sailed the 7 seas and it ain't sinking any time soon!

I hope it's true because I'm owner of the Barracuda 7200.7 and don't want to pay for something which isn't 100% I would like to have. I have only one question. Why is my HDD recognised as ATA100 drive in diagnostics programs like AIDA32 or SiSoft Sandra and many others? Of course I have their latest versions.
Edit: I have Barracuda 7200.7 Serial Ata.

What difference does it make what kind of HD you have, if it's fast and good? WILU is your HD bad if you find out that it's not 100% that what you have dreaming of it?

Hmm, you know, if I'm paying my hard earned money for something, I want to get what I want. If I'm buying serial ata drive I want TRUE serial ata drive with all benefits from it. Differences in prices between serial ata and parallel ata hdds aren't big, but...

But it is SATA HD if it uses SATA bus. And difference in speed with nowadays SATA/150 and PATA/133 HD's isn't that big if both have same cache size.

askoff, there are differences besides physical connection type and maximum theoretical throughput, things that only 100% true SATA does and a PATA drive with an SATA bridge will not do.

Yes there are, but AFAIK there still isn't big difference in performance .

It's probably the controller or the program. Sandra is certainly not omniscient, and if you are using an ATA100 controller with a translator it will be right!

As I stated earlier, most SATA controllers are not "true" SATA controllers, but rather use a translator. What's more, what Windows calls some component, especially if it's new, has little bearing on what it actually is - Windows for instance classifies PCI card ATA controllers as "SCSI devices" when they are clearly not.
The VIA southbridge (8237) SATA is not native despite what VIA claims, and I am dubious that SIS' or ALI's (assuming ALI has one at this point) implementations are any more "native" - likewise with Promise.

The only "true" native SATA solutions are from Silicon Image, and possibly the Intel ICH5. What the device is listed as in device manager (what Sandra reads) may still be an "ATA100 controller" in the latter case.

edit: ICH6 is not yet out

I have Abit IC7 motherboard which is based on the i875P [ICH5R], so this should not be a problem.

It shouldnt be a problem, it should be running fully Serial.
Just don't depend on Sandra or AIDA telling you the whole truth.

Yep, I have to admit, I'm also a seagate fan

I have the 120Gb version and its soooooo quiet. Performance is also very good!

I don't know what to think... I have two Seagate drives at home - a 16 GB one (almost 3 years old) and an old 4 GB one (almost 6 years old). While the 4 GB drive still works perfectly, the 16 GB drive died and reports a dielectric failure. I used it about 8 hours a day and was built in my Pentium II PC which I use for browsing the Internet, doing homework and programming. The 4 GB disk is used 24/7 in a server running Linux.

it's been my observation over the years that HDs that are never turned off or spun down last seemingly forever, while HDs that are shut off every day or spun down all the time by power management die all the time.

Problem resolved! Bios update and some "tricks" in the bios and my Seagate is recognised as Serial Ata drive.