Seagate 120GB External Storage
by Purav Sanghani on September 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Seagate 120GB External Drive’s Construction
What Seagate has done is taken their mid-performance 120GB 7200RPM Barracuda drive with 8MB cache and 8.5ms average seek times and have encased it with thick plastic to make it look like a desktop peripheral, which can be moved around easily from PC to PC. Wanting to take the thing apart and tinker with the insides, we were disappointed to find, from our Seagate sources themselves, that there was no method of getting inside the casing besides to crack the thing open with a screw driver.
The following 3 models are available from Seagate:
*Information in the table has been taken directly from Seagate’s website.
**Theoretical limit. Actual transfer rates may differ.
Seagate offers the USB 2.0-only models in 3 sizes: 120GB, 160GB, and 250GB. Higher capacity models are also available, which are in the USB/FireWire line. That current product line features total capacities of up to 400GB with a 500GB version expected to be released later this year.
What Seagate has done is taken their mid-performance 120GB 7200RPM Barracuda drive with 8MB cache and 8.5ms average seek times and have encased it with thick plastic to make it look like a desktop peripheral, which can be moved around easily from PC to PC. Wanting to take the thing apart and tinker with the insides, we were disappointed to find, from our Seagate sources themselves, that there was no method of getting inside the casing besides to crack the thing open with a screw driver.
Click to enlarge.
The following 3 models are available from Seagate:
| Configurations for Seagate's External Drives | |||||
| Model No. | Capacity | Rotational Speed | Cache (Buffer) | Seek Time (Read, typical) | Interface Transfer Rate |
| ST3120027A-RK | 120 GB | 7200 RPM | 8 MB | 8.5 ms | USB 2.0: Up to 480 Mbps (60 Megabytes/s**). |
| ST3160026A-RK | 160 GB | 7200 RPM | 8 MB | 8.5 ms | |
| ST3250801U2-RK | 250 GB | 7200 RPM | 8 MB | 8.5 ms | |
**Theoretical limit. Actual transfer rates may differ.
Seagate offers the USB 2.0-only models in 3 sizes: 120GB, 160GB, and 250GB. Higher capacity models are also available, which are in the USB/FireWire line. That current product line features total capacities of up to 400GB with a 500GB version expected to be released later this year.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
14 Comments
View All Comments
foot167 - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
I just returned the 300GB model today after 3 weeks of use. Everything I read about them said they were terrible but I had to give them a shot anyway. Sometimes my computer wouldn't recognize the drive. it would say no drive there. then on monday the drive decided that it was unformatted and needed to be reformatted. good thing that i kept a copy of everything i put on the external on my internal drives.the 300gb one can be had for under $200 and even less after rebates.
How about some reliability tests on these drives. Does the firewire/usb interface affect the reliability of these drives? Are they prone to crashing for some reason?
ScottyDog - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
I agree with your comments about reliability with these external drives. I have one and have the same problems with the disk suddenly becoming "unformatted". I have done a google search and this is a huge problem with these external USB or Firewire chipsets whether they are are the Oxford or Prolific flavors.Somebody really needs to do an article about what is going on here as I have resorted to leaving my drive off unless I am doing a backup and then need to restore otherwise all my data gets destroyed.
I originally thought it might be due to write caching and changing it to safe mode but it makes no difference with mine. If I leave it on eventually it becomes "Unformatted".
type this into google and you will see this is a wide spread problem with these external drives: windows delayed write failure
Googer - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
Dosen't it have 1394? I won't buy an External HDD with out 1394a and/or 1394b.MASCARNHAS - Monday, June 21, 2010 - link
I've used Report and although its great, I've had better luck with WheresTheFreeSpace. It is Modeled after a PC application that is very popular called <a href="http://www.wheresthefreespace.com">Treesiz... (but its for Mac).</a>