Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160023AS

• Reviewed by: tunnie

  Strengths: last for the period of the warranty.

  Weaknesses: Died like 3 months after the warranty

  Overall: Would go with a 5 year one next time..Sucks I have a bunch of stuff on here i need.Go witht he ones with the longer warranty.and back up your data after three years!

• Reviewed by: PatinTexas

  Strengths: great price point, nice external package

  Weaknesses: Advertised sturdiness not exactly right

  Overall: I purchased the 160G external hard drive by Seagate on 22 Dec. Loaded a bunch of files at the office and took them home to backup on home computer. That same day, the external drive slipped as I was sitting it on my desk and I caught it with my foot and by its power cord. Sat it back up on the desk and tried to read it. Not recognized by the computer. Subsequent tests by pros shows the drive crashed from that low impact drop-catch of about 20 inches. It didn't hit the floor, just touched my shoe as I caught it.

• Reviewed by: fishandring

  Strengths: quiet drive. sata power hookup is smaller.

  Weaknesses: none seen

  Overall: Please ignore all the reviews below regarding warranties. All seagate drive sold after 6/24/04 are FIVE (5) year warranty drives. These are extremely reliable drives.

• Reviewed by: Magendanz

  Strengths: Native SATA interface (no bridge chipset). Good performance. Quiet idle.

  Weaknesses: Noisy seek chatter. No standard 4-pin Molex power socket.

  Overall: I have two of these drives and they've really performed flawlessly...except for the lack of AAM support. I use them on a Media Center PC and the seek chatter is audible from the next room, rendering the exceptionally low idle noise levels effectively worthless. I'm told that Seagate has disabled AAM due to a lawsuit with Convolve, but that OEMs still have the opportunity to preorder the drives in Quiet mode (minimum purchase $2.5 million per quarter). Seagate has hinted that some 3rd-party disk utilities might be able to switch the AAM mode, but most of the usual suspects report only that AAM is unsupported on the drive. Basically, retail customers looking for a quiet drive are still out of luck until this suit is settled.

• Reviewed by: shawnbert

  Strengths: Solid performance in RAID configuration, low noise and low heat

  Weaknesses: None

  Overall: Running strong over six months in a RAID 0 config with 3 drives. Zero errors under heavy disk load in multitasking operations, e.g. downloads, mpegs, file moves, 3D and other intense gaming