Seagate Barracuda 400 GB Internal Hard Drive

This hard drive was purchased to...

Strengths: Large size, cool temperature, and very quiet operation - topped off with an industry leading 5 year warranty.

Weakness: Speed.

This hard drive was purchased to replace a Western Digital 250gb 8mb cache hard drive, and so far I have been very pleased with everything it has had to offer. I purchased the unit during one of CompUSA's sales for $230, resulting in a price per gigabyte of $0.575. Unfortunately, the prices on the unit are selling for substantially more at this time, so you will end up paying more. Even at $300,...
Read Full Review

This hard drive was purchased to replace a Western Digital 250gb 8mb cache hard drive, and so far I have been very pleased with everything it has had to offer. I purchased the unit during one of CompUSA's sales for $230, resulting in a price per gigabyte of $0.575. Unfortunately, the prices on the unit are selling for substantially more at this time, so you will end up paying more.

Even at $300, $0.75 a gigabyte, the drive is a bargain. The 400gb size is currently the largest, with half terabyte drives coming soon. Size is not it's only redeeming quality, the 3 x 133gb platters that Seagate uses result in substantially cooler running temperatures AND very quiet operation. Seagate didn't stop there! They even throw in an industry-leading 5 year warranty on the drive, in comparison to Western Digital's and Maxtor's standard 1 year warranty. Let me give one word of warning about warranty repairs with ANY manufacturer, they'll send you a refurbished drive as a replacement almost all the time.

So far the drive sounds perfect, right? Well, it does have one major drawback - speed. Doing any type of data transfers to the hard drive, be it as one continuous transfer or multiple random transfers, the drive just chugs in comparison to the Maxtor's and Western Digital's I've used before.

Bottom Line: If you are using it as a storage device for your movies, music, or other files, it's perfect. If you're considering it as a primary drive to run your Operating System or programs, look to Western Digital or Maxtor.

By cswake - Mar 24, 2005

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB Hard Drive

Strengths: Roomy, affordable drive with plenty of space of data or multimedia files at a relatively low cost per gigabyte.

Weakness: Access times (speed) are a bit sluggish at times, perhaps a norm for Seagate drives due to their low noise?

The 7200.8 is a great drive, combining high transfer rates with minimal noise and a low level of waste heat. This drive is perfect for use as an external portable drive, that is of course, with an external casing. With their five year warranty, it's hard to go wrong with a Seagate! (But if you do, just send it in and you'll have another right away.)

By guf - Oct 17, 2005

Great storage

Strengths: Massive amount of storage space, quiet, very little heat. 5 year warranty.

Weakness: Quietness and low heat means slow speeds

This drive is a good candidate for an external hard drive. It produces very little heat and is very quiet. These characteristics are perfect for something that have to be placed into a enclosure, which usually means limited air flow. These good characteristics however come with a trade off - speed. In order to have low volume and less, you are sacrificing performance. But in general, the...
Read Full Review

This drive is a good candidate for an external hard drive. It produces very little heat and is very quiet. These characteristics are perfect for something that have to be placed into a enclosure, which usually means limited air flow. These good characteristics however come with a trade off - speed. In order to have low volume and less, you are sacrificing performance. But in general, the reliability of a drive varies inversely with the amount of heat and noise it produces, so I much rather have less heat and performance and a reliable drive.

By mavx14 - Oct 17, 2005

Fantastic Drive!

Strengths: Extremely quiet, 5 year warranty, runs very cool

Weakness: A little slower than the competitors... but still well worth the money

I've stopped buying anything but Seagate drives. I've never had a single one of the half a dozen I have go bad and why should they with a 5 year warranty (when the other manufacturers are all dropping theirs to 1 year and making you pay more if you want a longer one) These drives are VERY VERY quiet and perfect for a DVR, XBOX upgrade, or your computer. Hard drives should not be seen and more...
Read Full Review

I've stopped buying anything but Seagate drives. I've never had a single one of the half a dozen I have go bad and why should they with a 5 year warranty (when the other manufacturers are all dropping theirs to 1 year and making you pay more if you want a longer one)

These drives are VERY VERY quiet and perfect for a DVR, XBOX upgrade, or your computer. Hard drives should not be seen and more importantly NOT BE HEARD!

I highly recommend this drive.

By bonez - Mar 5, 2006

100% failure rate on these drives

Strengths: Quiet, fast; when they work, they work great.

Weakness: I've had 3 hard drives fail in exactly the same way - they will not power up.

I've been a Seagate fan for my entire I.T. career, over 20 years. I still fondly remember the old ST225 and ST251-1 drives. Seagate has the best warranty in the business, and their drives have always been the quietest and most reliable. Until now. I do all my "off-site" backups of my home Linux servers to external hard drives. Of course, disk space keeps growing, so I bought a couple 400GB...
Read Full Review

I've been a Seagate fan for my entire I.T. career, over 20 years. I still fondly remember the old ST225 and ST251-1 drives. Seagate has the best warranty in the business, and their drives have always been the quietest and most reliable. Until now.

I do all my "off-site" backups of my home Linux servers to external hard drives. Of course, disk space keeps growing, so I bought a couple 400GB drives. One was DOA, replaced by the vendor. The other failed after less than 20 hours of use, and now the replacement has died after less than 10 hours.

Internet forums are full of people complaining about the nosedive in quality of Seagate drives lately. Fortunately for me, I don't have any critical systems running with these drives, but I'm getting tired of constantly returning drives to the vendor. Not to mention the warm fuzzy feeling of my personal data on perfectly good platters, getting sent all over the country.

It seems the drive works fine if it's left powered on. If it is powered down and powered back up some time later, it's a crapshoot whether or not it will ever spin up again. Of course, this is not the firmware issue that is posted on Seagate's tech support website - this is purely a hardware failure.

Bear in mind that I use other external drives (older Seagate, Western Digital, & Maxtor) for my backups, and have had absolutely zero problems with them. My vendor has even acknowledged that they've had a huge problem with these drives.

My vendor will not swap out these drives for another model (or brand), so I will take this to Seagate directly. But, in short -

Stay Away From This Drive! You Will Be Sorry!

By anonymous; - Jun 20, 2009