Customer Reviews

Seagate ST3160023A-RK Internal Barracuda 7200 160 GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It's pretty hard to go wrong with a Seagate drive; great performance and a five year warranty make this hard to beat, and the price is right. Other than that, there's not much you can say about a hard drive... most of the time you don't care about it, until it crashes! That's why it makes sense to go for the best quality drive you can find, and that would be the Seagate.

While the drive comes with software to migrate your old operating system to the new drive, be warned that it's hard to get a clean migration. I tried this twice, and some things kept getting scrambled in the registry. I finally decided to just reload the operating system from scratch and copy the data files over (made the new drive the master, and the old drive the slave; the documentation explains how to do this, it's easy). A fresh installation is probably for the best anyway, as registries tend to get gunked up over time. Keep in mind that your operating system installation CD may not recognize the full 160GB (my older WinXP Pro CD only saw the first 131GB, until I loaded SP2 later), so you may wind up with a second partition. But that's not a big deal, it's still a great drive, and my system is noticeably faster now.

I bought this hard drive knowing that SEAGATE was an awsome hardware company, but I had never actually owned one of their products. Well, everything good that you about them, belive them! This drive is super quiet, and with an 8MB cache, it is extremely quick and responsive. I don't use it in a PC or Mac, so I don't know for sure how it performs for those, but it has got to be even better. I used this drive to replace my XBOX HDD since it decided to crap out on me about 4 months ago. I run multi GB programs off it and it handles the data stream PERFECTLY! And for $85, you just cannot come close to beating it!

I installed this as a second hard-drive to enhance space. The drive was very easy to install and works great. It also seems quieter than my other drive. I am not very tech saavy so the ease of installation was extremely important to me. One issue is that I have an old BIOS and computer so it can't format anything above like 128 GB. If I had to do it again, I might opt for the 120 GB version.

Be aware that Seagate has disabled AAM (auto acoustic management) from the factory on all their drives due to a pending lawsuit for copyright infringement. AAM is part of the ATA specifications, however Seagate doesn't mention anywhere that their products are missing this important feature -- not on the retail box, not in their specs, not on their website.

In addition to that, every 40 secs the drive runs an idle scan (Seagate calls it STIR - Seek To Increase Reliability) whose purpose is to prevent the head from overheating from sitting on the same place for too long. This produces a loud buzz, a clicking noise or a combination of the two, as other reviewers have noticed.

Bottom line: other than an exceptionally high level of noise, this drive has nothing special to offer in terms of price, performance or storage capacity.

I am very impressed by Seagate's software and documentation. I bought this to replace an aging 16GB hard drive. The installation software worked so flawlessly I couldn't believe it. Within less than an hour all my files were on the new drive, and I had a manual with specific instructions on how to make the new drive the primary one, remove the old drive and get going again. I am not a "computer person". The software even made the registry settings required to recognize drives over 128MB.

I needed a additional hard drive because my 40GB one was getting full. I bought the Seagate 160GB Internal drive almost a year ago (Dec. 2004 to be exact) at [...]. [...]... can you believe it??
I knew the Seagate name and knew I couldn't go wrong with it.

No disappointment. The installation was very easy. I haven't had to think or worry about that drive for the whole year that it's been in my computer.

I'd recommend it in a heart beat!

Bought this drive primarily for the 5 yr warranty. For the 2 years it was in service, drive was error free and operated relatively noise free. Disk died on me around the 2nd anniversary. Sent to Seagate for data recovery. Balked at the estimate of $1500. Most data recovery efforts will void the warranty anyway. In future, i will be more focussed on taking backups, and paying less attention to the warranty details.

I'll installed a number of different HDs in my years. All seem to end with a call to tech support or a good friend that has experience with this sort of technology. SeaGate made it as simple as can be with the software that loads prior to hardware installation and a printed manual specific to your task. From start to finish the entire process was no longer than 30 minutes and the drive is working flawlessly.

This drive is fast and wonderfully quiet. The quietness of the drive is the number one reason I chose it over its competitors.

I sent my new Macbook Pro(Intel Pentium II) back twice to the factory and had it gutted to find the problem of it crashing. It turns out it is the Bounceback Express Software that this device comes with. The software is like a virus itself because it constantly is working to find updates. It would freeze up my cursor and scramble the keyboard lettering.

As for this drive it works great with out the software and is very fast to upload using firewire. I would NOT put that evil software in your precious system. I also read on these reviews that some of these devices can have virusses inside so be weary of that.