Customer Reviews

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB Ultra ATA/100 Internal Hard Drive (ST3400832A)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

OK, we had two of these in May at work. Installed no problems in two pcs which were running cool. Both started to fail last month. I checkd out storage review and it turns out these drives, part of the 7200.8 Seagate 250, 300, and 400 gb line, are the least reliable drives on the market today.

to the person in the other review who does NOTY have a 7200.8 yet denegrated reviewers who have had this drive fail by correnting "misinformation": you are wrong. New egg is a good place to purchase, but as their site clearly notes the REMOVE negative reviews. no one trusts their reviews.

The real reviews are at storagereview dot com. this is THE acknowledged and respected hard drive review site. this drive has ABYSSMAL ratings. there are literally hundreds of data points from expert users and this Seagate 400 gb drive is in the seventh percentile, ie 93% of the drives on the market today are more reliable!

The large format (>250gb) comparable Hitachi and Maxtor are three and four times LESS likly to fail than the 7200.8 Seagates! that is a huge difference.

ussers on amazon (who actuallyhave had the drive are disappointed, hundreds of experts who handle thosuands of drives have shown extremely high failure rates over at storage review. Somethign is obviously wrong.

FYI, this drive has a higher failure problem thant the 2001 "deathstar" episode!

I researched the market looking for an external storage solution for my notebook; with external drive high prices and modest 1 year warranty going for an internal IDE of my choice and installing it in a $30 USB 2.0 enclosure was economical and easy.

The Drive; what is in the box? 3.5" drive, IDE cable, screws, 1 extra jumper, user manual, and applications CD (Installation Wizard, SeaTools diagnostic utilities, and BounceBack Backup Software). No other internal drive comes with back up software, period. The Barracuda 7200.8 drive speed secret is tucked in Seagate use of new 3 platters drive design (3x133 Meg each) versus the (4x100 Meg) or (5x80 Meg) platters designs other drives' makers use, since the drive head will spend less time spinning and traveling to find and read/write data.

Installation: First install CD software, Second: set the drive jumper to Master or Salve, Third: install the physical drive in a bay or an enclosure. Fourth: run the installation Wizard, which will guide you to format and partition the drive to either FAT or NTFS format. Of course you could partition the drive to 2 or more drive and assign any Alpha letters to it as you wish. Note: the final actual drive size after formatting is about 372 Meg.

Benefits: 3 months running fine, use the drive to (1) Backup my C drive, the BounceBack software install an icon that runs active in Windows quick launch system tray so it can run on demand, it also pops up every week to remind you to backup, or you can customize it to backup on any interval, (2) Store digital photos, MP3, graphic files, large data bases, burn and store DVD and family movies to folders rather than DVD+R discs, (3) Transfer data from and to other computers' since the USB enclosure is portable and swappable.

Performance: The Barracuda deliver an impressive performance running at 7200 RPM despite its 8 Meg cache size. Real world tests (using my hand watch) it copies an average of 1 Gig per 1 Minute, (it is actually faster than my internal Laptop's 5400 drive), the tests shows that its faster when transferring fewer larger files, and it's slower when coping a lot of smaller files. The drive runs cool and very quiet, you only see the light blinking without the humming noise other drives make.

Conclusion: if you are looking for a massive storage, innovative, silent, and solid performer, and 5 years warranty peace of mind, the Seagate 400 Meg Ultra ATA is for you. If you're looking for an external solution, get you an aluminum USB 2/Firewire enclosure and $ave. It's cheap, fun, Windows recognize it instantly, and it install in 5 minutes.

I purchased the Seagate 400GB drive from Amazon in January and installed it into a Cremax SohoTank 2-bay FW enclosure. Installation and operation under OS X 10.3.x have been problem free so far. The Seagate is quieter and runs cooler than my 250gb Maxtors, and hasn't given my any problems under light-duty use as a streaming music server for my household. Amazon's price has gone way up since I bought it, which is the only thing holding me back from buying a couple more.

I should have listen to all the bad reviews about this drive. I went with the good reviews instead, and also because it was on sale for $99.99. Big mistake. Wasted 2 hours transferring data to this extra drive, then it clashed. This drive was extremely hot as I was checking to see what was happening. I could have used it to iron my clothes! Needless to say, I removed the drive, return it, and swear I'll never get another Seagate. I wish I could rate this drive a minus 5 stars.

I bought this drive because of its capacity, and because it's one of the few large drives that can operate successfully in my PVR (ReplayTV 5040). After installing the PVR software I installed the drive. The machine booted and successfully downloaded my local program details. I then programmed the PVR to record junk programs just to fill the drive, approximately 160 hours at the best video quality picture, which it did with no problem. Considering the installation successful, I then erased all programs and scheduled recordings of programs that I wanted to view. Two weeks later I turned my PVR on to find it in a constant reboot cycle. Unplugging, manually rebooting, the two techniques that normally solve this problem, produced no change. I then disassembled the PVR to remove the drive so I could run Seagate diagnostics. The drive was so hot that I could not touch it without using a towel, and had a "burned electronics" odor. Once it cooled, I connected the drive to my computer to run diagnostics. The Seagate program recognized the drive by model number but could not test anything, and said the drive was defective, and to check warranty status, which lasts until 2010. Seagate now has the drive and is in the process of shipping a replacement. I have since installed a 320GB Hitachi in my PVR and it is performing flawlessly. For reference the PVR is installed in a cool well ventilated location so I do not believe anything external precipitated the drive failure. While lost recorded TV programs is of no major consequence, I don't believe I would trust this drive for critical use in a PC, or as a data backup device.

I purchased the Barracuda 7200.8 about 13 months ago and have been very happy with it...until now. I'd been using it as my primary slave to a 30 GB Western Digital. I powered up the computer after it had been shutdown for about 12 hours and suddenly, my BIOS wouldn't recognize the Barracuda. I'm not a very excitable person, so I thought I would systematically try different configurations and jumper settings, use the drive as a stand-alone master, and run through every prudent step before giving up on the drive. After all, it has tons of files that I had been trying to preserve...(why else buy a large capacity hard drive?).

Well, several days later, I'm afraid I'm left with a useless drive. I certainly can't say that a hard drive should last for only 13 months because I have this 30 GB Western Digital drive that I've used as a master for over four years now. I have a Maxtor that is in my son's computer that is even older.

Large hard drives should be dependable. A company like Seagate shouldn't try to be on the cutting edge of storage if their reliablity suffers. I'm a bit angry, but mostly very disappointed. Find another brand for long time usage.

I bought this drive for backup purposes. It lasted about 6 months with about 1% uptime. (that's it!). And now it's a brick. The red lights flash on and off when I try to boot it up. I will not buy this brand again.

zero stars (but amazon made me choose, 1thru5 so i chose 1 under protest.

As others have noted, this drive is starting to get a reputation for failure. I have two in a PowerPC with a probably 75% a week uptime. One of the two became flaky after about 6 months. It finally gave up the ghost this week. I would recommend stearing clear. I'm about to find out if I will be steering clear of all Seagate drives in the future (depending on how they handle warranty service).

The new Seagate 400GB drive comes with DiscWizard for Windows. I found that this program must be run no less than three times to partition and format the drive beyond 127GB without overlay drivers, at least in Windows XP Home. The first time you have to settle for 127GB, which is a bummer if you're replacing a larger boot drive and copying all of your files. Then you reboot. The second time you have to confirm that you want to enable large disk drive access, then reboot. On the third boot, you can specify the larger / new partition(s). Still, its hard to beat the capacity for the price.

Bought one of these some time ago, only to discover upon opening my Dell Dimension 8300 that internal drive was running SATA rather than IDE controller (contrary to system info provided by Dell!). Well... not that I'm griping. ;-) Instead of small IDE card, which, with new drive would add pretty significantly to heat in already pretty loaded-up PC innards (DVD-RW, CD-RW, Floppy, 120GB SATA HD, Audigy Sound Card, high-end nVidia gfx card, Full RAM, Memory Card Reader, etc. ad nauseum <G>), I decided the drive probably would serve best as an external add-on. So, also from Amazon, bought an Ultra brand 3.5" USB/Firewire box for about same price as inexpensive IDE cards (already mentioned needing no more heat sources inside PC case!), connected *idiot-proofed* ribbon cable, closed it up, plugged it in, turned it on (nice little on/off switch located on back of Ultra box), connected it to my PC, and viola! When PC fired up, here it was -- all ready to go without even needing the included start-up disk or anything (altho' disk probably has latest drivers and other Seagate goodies). Within' a couple of weeks, I had re-recorded my entire compliment of 500+ CD and other media music collection to it with no problems whatever, also copied over my ~7000 MP3 format music collection, my seemingly endless digital photos, backed up some of my personal files, setup info, yada yada yada... and still have about 175GB left for other goodies (more new tunes, hopefully)! The drive seems rock solid and steady: ships with the awesome Seagate warranty, and after using it for over three months now, have had NO problems! GREAT drive, HIGHLY reccomended (well, maybe I ought'a wait a few more months... <G>). NOTE: Nothing whatever to do with the drive, but unfortunately Ultra external box (with cooling fan, on/off switch, etc.) is fairly noisy, but at least I could mount it away from my ears on a nearby book cabinet shelf where it shouldn't be in danger of bumps or being knocked over. The final verdict? Overall, a quite inexpensive and painless-to-install purchase and in my case -- always adding new CD *albums* -- a solid hard working HD doing hard time without complaints. Again, Highly recommended. Already earned the four stars given; if it lasts as long as advertised (and guaranteed), it'll be a 5-star bargain for sure! :-)