When building a cheap and cheerful Internet browsing PC for a friend, 80GB of storage seemed easily enough. After some browsing I discovered the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB, and found that it covers all the important points when buying a hard disk.
An excellent and comprehensive 5 Year warranty was provided as standard, which certainly leads to a lot of peace of mind. Hard disks always seem to be the weakest link within Home PCs, so it is always nice to see a manufacturer putting faith into a non-enterprise level product.
The large 2MB Cache also attracted me to the Seagate, and the low price tag was the final decider for me. A day later I had the Seagate installed in the PC ready for its first boot. The PC in question is a fairly standard box - an AMD Sempron 2800+, 256MB of DDR RAM and a Gigabyte motherboard. The hard disk worked seamlessly from the moment the power button was pressed, being correctly detected by the BIOS and seen to its full capacity.
Windows XP did not take long at all to install. I use an older PC as a benchmark for install times - The old P4 1.8GHz PC with 256MB of RAM and an older Seagate 40GB hard disk takes exactly 30 minutes to install XP Home Edition.
The new PC with the 80GB Seagate hard disk set up took just 14 minutes to perform a full XP Home installation - That's from the first 'Press any key to boot from CD…' screen, right through to the final reboot into Windows. Very impressive!
Seagate have always been one of the top tier hard disk manufacturers - but face it, what good is a manufacturer if they are unwilling to help resolve any issues you may have? I decided to put Seagate's technicians to the test with a few fairly simple problems for them to resolve. The problems I presented were - Non-detection of hard disk, Partitioning queries, and last but not least, the omni-present 'My PC won't use more than 8GB of the disk'.
Seagate were quick off the mark for the non-detection - their first solution worked just fine. With the partitioning queries, the technician I got hold of seemed a bit confused, so I got passed to a senior member of the team. I was pleased to say he knew how to set two versions of Windows up on the same disk, and how to make an invisible partition. Well done Seagate. With the last problem (Which is common in older PCs that have issues with large disks), the solution was rather obvious, yet it took the technician more than 10 minutes to track down the solution.
There is a setting on most drives that allows you to tell the drive to appear as just 32GB, and this usually resolves any 8GB limits. Of course you will only have a 32GB drive, but you will have the extra speed a newer drive offers. Eventually the technician presented this solution, but after a lot of messing about with cables and BIOS settings.
The Seagate website is very helpful with common questions regarding Warranty, Recycling, Drive Testing and other common user queries. You can download the drive testing software online, and make a boot disk to eradicate any doubt regarding the reliability of your Seagate hard disk. I am pleased to say that I am very impressed with the Barracuda. All aspects of this wonderful drive have easily exceeded my expectations, including areas that are unrelated to the quality of the products themselves. Describing how to partition a drive really isn't Seagate's problem, but they were more than happy to lend a hand if needed.
Bravo Seagate!
More details
Design
Excellent
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Excellent
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