Look Out For Seagate Barracuda

With motherboards and storage devices beginning to require SATA II drives, system integrators are on the lookout for affordable hard disk drives with a large storage capacity. The SATA/300 drives from Seagate Technology fit the bill with an attractive price, roomy capacity, reliability and a handful of drive-management tools.

Priced at $99.99, the Barracuda internal hard drive from Seagate is both affordable and easy to install. During a recent computer upgrade, CRN Test Center engineers installed a 500-Gbyte internal hard drive from Seagate's SATA/300 product lineup. The SATA drive has a 3-Gbps data rate and comes with a SATA interface cable and a 4-pin to 15-pin SATA power adapter cable. The drive is quiet during operation, even during heavy loads.

Seagate added a few other features to the drive, such as clean sweep, which automatically calibrates the drive at power up, and offline scans to run diagnostic tests when the drive is idle.

These SATA drives can also be used in the same system as PATA, as long as the motherboard can support both interfaces. Because the drives use a SATA interface, there's no need to set jumpers, determine master/slave relationships, or wrestle with ribbon cables. However, some motherboards and older chipsets can't handle auto-speed-negotiation and cause problems during bootup. For those 1.5-Gbps motherboards, the drive can be forced down to the lower transfer rate instead of the default 3 Gbps.

Seagate ships the drive with its Disc Utility CD. The Windows-based utility helps install the hard disk drive as an additional storage drive or create a clone of another disk drive to migrate data, operating system and programs.

Tweet

   

More