Customer Reviews

Seagate ST3200822A-RK 200 GB ATA Internal Hard Drive

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Purchased product for $139 in Nov 2004. Works well, and relatively silent. Use it as an external hard drive (USB enclosure). No Problems with product. Seagate rebate was a different issue altogether...

Rebate check arrived on 3/10/2005 (with an expiry date that I realized afterwards was 3/7/2005). I deposited check only to have it bounce because of the stale date (cost me $12 - which, of course, Seagate wont reimburse). Seagate has promised to mail me another check...Its April 30, 2005 today, and I was told I should get it in 5 weeks. 8 months to get $50...no wonder we all hate mail-in rebates.

Updated: 03-07-06, 07-05-07 Update: 07-05-07 KEEP IT COOL!! I bought a coolerMaster 4 internal drive bay that has a big fan infront and I never let my drives get much over 100 degrees. Drives from 120GB on get very very HOT if they don't have a fan blowing on them. I believe this might contribute to early failure so be warned. News flash: seagate bought maxtor and they are the exact same drives now. However, the maxtor diag disk gives you more options such as burn-in and low level format / write zero. It takes 4 or 5 hours or more to run on a 500G drive. The "big" 200, 300, 400, 500GB drives seem to be getting more reliable although, I bought a Seagate 500G drive and tested it with the diagonostics and it passed the read scan but then I ran the Maxtor burn-in test and it failed then I hear the motor spin up and down and they the bios stopped sting the drive. I wrote the error code on the drive and ran it back to fry's electronics in san diego and exchanged it for another that passed all tests with flying colors. Existing review: --------------------------------------- I sent back RMA'ed the Seagate 300GB internal ATA drive - it cost $400 to get the data off it from a data recovery place. I found out Maxtor was bought by Seagate in dec 05. That makes sense that I bought and returned two internal maxtor sata 250GB drives - tested both before use. The first failed by corrupting files in 7 days. The second reported drive failing on their diagnostics utilities. WD is no saint either. The entire industry from what I am reading is turning out junk drives. WD and other 120GB probably most reliable. 200G and up = ???? back your data up with these large drives!!! By the way I bought another Seagate 300GB drive - a sata drive to bkup the one that failed. I like the 5 yr warranty and if all the brands / mfg's are making junk why not just buy 2 drives and use the 2nd as a bkup. Updated: 01-12-06 3 Failed 200G drives in 1 year is too much! I have two Seagate drives in the RMA process going back for warranty right and am negotiating to get free data recovery service from them since the primary and the backup drive (outside the computer failed at the same time!) I use a variety of aftermarket inexpensive drive enclosures. I have never had a problem with any USB enclosure. I repair computers and have done so for many years. Read on... SEAGATE & Large HD drive Problems: I think we are returning to the 2000-2004 era of big hard drive problems. Too often "techs" keep thinking of every micro problem and ignore the big picture. I'm a tech and I saw IBM's Deathstar (Deskstar) now Hitachi successfully class-action Sued for quality problems. I had 40G in 2001 go bad slowly corrupting the files - RMA'ed it and got a 60G that failed the same way ~ 1.5 yrs later. I have scene 3 Deskstars fail in customer computers all with the exact same tell-tale scratching noise. Fast Forward: I bought a Maxtor 250 SATA. Ran and it passed all diagnostic tests. 7 days later I was getting corrupt files (previous drive is a wd and has been run 7 days /wk for 6 years with not one single problem. Ran the diagnostics said drive is failing and returned it to Fry's Electronics. Got a 2nd drive and tested it before using it and this time I got drive is failing code right away. Spring 2004 I reluctantly bought my first PATA Seagate 200G Drive. Ran all tests - no problems. 1 month later I was getting the dreaded Seagate power noise - it is as thought you unplugged and quickly plugged the drive back in. Got an RMA code from their diagnostic (full test said bad) the 2nd replacement drive failed and I am rma'ing that now. Seagate didn't want to RMA it because it was beyond the 1 yr warranty but said due to all the documented failures I had experienced they would send me a 3rd drive but it would only carry a 90 day warranty. The problem: I heard a few very minor noises over the past week. Yesterday my backup / test system - a fully 48 bit LBA > 137GB compliant (Seagate certified) ABIT NF7M system would not boot w2k sp4. When I unplugged the SEA 300G drive it booted fine. Ran the drive via USB and it couldn't mount it under w2k. The drive has read errors and makes a continuous clicking noise. Wow, the 200G backup drive failed and I said no problem thank God it was just a backup drive. Now the 300G is back a week later with 250G of data on it of which 200G is NO LONGER BACKED UP (the 200G is now being rma'ed to Seagate). I called "Rudy Cobb" at Seagate in Texas and left a message to call me. Seagate's data recovery starts at $500 and goes up. Also, a power Mac dual G5 has a Seagate 160G SATA drive that failed - it too made the dreaded power on/off noise. Apple warrantees it when I brought it to the store. Conclusion: Seagate bumped their warranty from 1 yr to 5 years in July 2004 to save their failing reputation. Maxtor only offers 1 yr. Clearly, the drives are not being made correctly and getting lost in MTBF's is silly - the drives are failing at 1% of their life expectancy! I have had zero problems with WD 120G drives. I believe they are the most bullet-proof drives currently being produced. 200G and up - I say watch out. I felt something was sketchy when that first Seagate 200G drive went bad. The news is slowly getting around that the Seagate is making a huge number of bad drives. Also, backups may not save you. I didn't know the 2nd sea200 was bad until I tried to copy certain large files. Then I got a read error meaning they were already corrupted with no warning or windows 2000 scandisk / checkdisk has forced a check message. SUMMARY: BAD: Hitachi (formerly IBM) Seagate (SATA / PATA great drive in the 90's, now low cost junk, corrupts slowly too with no warning until you attempt to access a bad file, so even backs ups may not save you. Expensive, if you must back up everything to two Seagate drives in case 2 fail at the same time. Probably about as bad as IBM Deathstar series.) Maxtor: 160G and below is ok, Over that is questionable. GOOD: (Best) WD 120 (most reliable IDE drive around today and for the past several years.) WD 160 Also good. WD 200GB+ unknown / untested.

I was very pleased with this drive. Fast and, as others have observed, very quiet. One note of caution. The install instructions are very basic, as they have to be. Seagate has no idea what kind of PC you're going to putting their hard-drive into, so the directions aren't much more than "plug in the data and power cables. See your computer's user's guide for more information..."

Before installing the drive, I'd check any documentation I happened to have. If you don't have any manuals, google up your particular machine and "installing second hard drive" and I can almost guarantee that someone else has tried to do the same thing.

Finally, check your PC's setup. For example, I put this into a Dell Dimension. The final step in the setup is to go into the BIOS setup and be sure that the Second Drive setting is set to "Auto" and not "Off." If it's set to off, the drive will still work - but very, very slowly!

That's just an example - your mileage may vary.

I've purchased these Seagates 200gb drives nearly every time I can find a rebated one for under 100$ - which means I've picked up 3 drives so far.

These are ultra-quiet drives. So quiet, in fact, that when I installed a Maxtor 160gb as my boot I was bothered by the noise increase.

Biggest concern: You MUST use the Seagate LBAH-Registry utility to open up the computer to drives over 128gb. I failed to do that and for about 3 hours had to futz around to figure out why I couldn't get the drive's full potential. The other utilities included with the drive offer trouble-free drive duplication/boot drive replacement- and best still, it worked ;)

All in all I'll keep buying these 200gb drives every chance I get. It's amazing how much space high end digital SLRs take up ;)

I bought this HDD mainly because of Seagate's reputation and the generous warranty. It is quiet and fast. Setup is a breeze. The 5-year warranty is clearly saying something about its reliablity, which blows away the standard 1-year warranty offered by the competitors.

The only gripe I have is that I had to update my version of the Intel Application Accelerator. With the old version the drive just would not format. Seagate support was both helpful and reponsive to all my inquiries.

Average so far. Since, I have a laptop I am using this as an external hard-drive encased in an aluminum case using firewire. I tried quite a few hard-drive brands (IBM, Maxtor, Western Digital, Iomega, Toshiba and now Seagate) out there and right now Seagate hold little or no advantages except for the huge 5 years warranty. In the past Seagate was one of the most expensive hard-drive out there, now it is average price.

What to like:
+The price is fair market for 200 gigs.
+Seagate past reputation and 5-year warranty is a plus.
+Fast 7200rpm, but not the fastest
+Easy set-up, then again if you done formatting before then this is not an issues. I don't use the back-up software that came with the drive, because I do it manually to DVD-r.
+No hardware problems yet except for:

Negative:
-Noisy hard-drive. I returned the first 200gig after loud clicking noise while copying. There is also a chronic clicking sound about every 1.5 min for 15sec while idle! Other reviewers have noted this too. Must be the hardware checking itself.
I use this as an eternal hard-drive, so I can hear everything. The second replacement from Best Buy is a lot quieter then the first, but is still nosier then my old external Western Digital, which was silence except for start-up. Both hard drives ran at 7200 rpm.
-Not SATA, but parallel works better for external.

Past Result:
IBM Deskstar- Still working somewhere
Maxtor- Still working somewhere.
2 Western Digitals- Both lasted about 2 years, never will buy again.
Toshiba- still on my 4-years old laptop.
Iomega- 4200 rpm external still working and very quiet.

Update:
After a month the clicking sound has been subdue (still there) a little or I got use to it.

For the past 8-10 years, Seagate has produced the best drives around. The ST3200822A-RK is no exception. I purchased two of these drives to upgrade both of my TiVos. They're perfect and relatively quite. I've had no problems with digital drop-outs even with both tuners recording AND playing back a previously recorded show. Nice drives!

I've never installed something on my computer and while I was a little bit apprehensive to do it myself, I gave it a try and it was very easy. The only hard part was figuring out where to put it and getting the cables to reach from my existing hard drive. I have a HP a200n.

I also forgot to open the drive up to over 137G the first time. It was easy to do with the supplied disk.

Works great. It's not noisy, but I can hear it start spinning a little bit when I initially use it.

The whole process was so easy and I'm so pleased that I'm tempted to get another. :)

Easy instalation, soft ware guides you easily in copying data from your old hard drive onto the new one, and quick responce on rebate.......................