SEAGATE BARRACUDA 3 : ULTRA ATA 100

20 GIG 7200 RPM ULTRA ATA INTERFACE

350G's nonoperating shock

3D Defense System

Model st 320414A

MB=Asus cuv4x 1009bios+latest VIA drivers

CPU=celeron 800 @ 992mhz , 384meg ram onboard, GF2mx + soundblaster live value.

Onto the review:

I now have two Seagate drives in my computer, the old one being a 8.4meg 5400rpm unit that was my main drive. Ive updated to the new Seagate because the old drive could not keep up when OCing the cel 800 to 992mhz. The old drive is now my back up drive, which used to be my Quantum Fireball ST 4.3's job.

Now if you think the celeron 800 at 992 is something to sneeze at check out the Sisoft Sandra 2001se results.

click to enlarge

You can see from the CPU benchmark that the results are not embarrassing , esp for a crippled P3 cpu called a celeron. You will note that ive included the AMD k6-2-500 in the results, this is the cpu I ran one year ago, so for all those people who still run this cpu.

To the Seagate drive: wow, my first impression was just how quiet this drive is, whisper quiet. My friend purchased a Seagate barracuda 7200rpm 15gig HDD some time ago , and this drive was noisy, and his system would crash constantly under win98. I was sure then and am still now that that drive was not quite right, and I told him to take it back , but before doing so he installed win2000 and now no problems, that I know off. I have had no problems what so ever with this drive , just for the record. It still amazes me that at 7200rpm its so quiet. Guess I was used the the whirring of the Quantum. Since my MB is ATA 66 the data transfer rates wont be as good as for ATA100 MB's but here we go in anyway.

My first test was using my burner software, I did a hardware test on c: drive and :

click to enlarge

The result being a transfer rate of about 26350 kb/second. Using CDcheck to test data transfer rates gave :

click to enlarge

The result being a data transfer rate of around 25415 kb/second. Using Sandra 2001se to check the Seagate :

click to enlarge

Sandra 2001se gave a data transfer rate of about 25067 kb/second. Now in the Sandra results you can see how this drive compares to other drives, such as the 30gig ATA100 7200rpm HDD which gave 24000 kb/second. Not to shabby at all I would say. esp as I was running Norton Antivirus and my MB monitor during the tests. Wait I hear you ask , just how good or bad was the old drive:

click to enlarge

Now I dont know if its because its the backup drive ( D:) or if it was actually that slow but 12285 kb/second , could this ATA 66 5400rpm HDD been that slow. That means that the new drive is more than twice as fast as the old one . As the primary drive , I think it did more like 15000 to 17000 kb/sec from memory, still , the new Seagate Barracuda 3 Ultra ATA just eats the older Seagate drive performance wise.

Conclusion:

What can I say about this drive, its fast, its soooo quiet. The performance compared to the 30gig drive in Sandra shows just how good this drive is , esp with my MB being ATA66 . And using 3 different types of software to test this drive , the results were remarkably consistent. My old Seagate has never given me a problem, and if this new drive is anything like Its older brother , it looks like I can expect years of trouble free service. With noise being a bye product of ever higher performance levels , its very nice to see a manufacturer make a quiet performance product, seriously, even with the side cover off I could not detect this drive spinning away. Seagate has become a well known and respected quality manufacturer and the Seagate Barracuda 3 Ultra ATA is a continuation of this tradition, and with 3 years warranty , if the unthinkable should occur , you know that your covered.