Seagate HD 200 GB ATA Internal Drive ( ST3200822A-RK )

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Easy to install. Works great. Most places recommend Seagate products over other hard drives. Highly recommend this drive for those who need lots of space.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Drive
Review: I am an end-user and installed it myself yesterday. Using it as a second drive. Excellent software to show you how to install, format and partition the drive and Bounceback Express software for creating backups. Works beautifully. I did need the Dell manual in addition to the directions that came with the drive. So far its flawless except that I can use ony 190GB. Very quiet too.

Rating:
Summary: Vastly Dependable
Review: I bought my Seagate 200GB external hard drive about 6 months ago. Despite the other reviews i think that this is a great reliable and dependable solution for either people who need to back up data, or just have an extra storage device. My favorite thing about this is that since it is formatted with the FAT file system, it is both Mac OS and PC compatible at once. This means you can store all the stuff from your PC, and bring it over to an Apple computer, and vica versa, which is pretty usefull.

I dont find this unit to be loud at all, its normal hard-disk volume. I have nothing against it, it just...works... I havent tried the backup software that comes with it, neither have i read the manual. You don't need to, its THAT easy.

Rating:
Summary: making noise
Review: I have nothing to complain about the functionality, price, and installation. They are all good. 200 giga bytes hard drive only coasts me $100 after rebate. Installation software works great. And copy files in/out without any problem.

But, the harddrive drives me crazy by its noise. It makes this low click-click noise while it accessing the disk, AND when it is idle. When it is idle, about every minute, it makes noise last around 3 seconds. The noise is not loud, but just enough to make me pay attention....


Rating:
Summary: Noisy, loud humming
Review: I have personally purchased 8 seagate barracuda ATA drives, and this is by far the worst I have ever used. It is loud and vibrates my entire case. I would NOT recommend this product. It is noisy to the point where it gives me a headache. I tried returning this product to Amazon.com a few days beyond the 30 day return, no go. I'm stuck with this HORRIBLE NOISY DRIVE. I've had no problem with the Seagate Barracuda 80 and 120GB drives and would recommend those instead. DO NOT PURCHASE THIS HARD DRIVE. You have been warned.

Rating:
Summary: I own 3 of these and I'll keep buying!
Review: 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 ;)

Rating:
Summary: Great drive, best in industry 5 year warranty
Review: This drive is superb. Silent and speedy! What you need to keep in mind is that these large drives may require an update to your PCs BIOS if your PC is more than a few years old in order for things to go smoothly. Do yourself a favor and update the BIOS before you install the drive. The drive itself is almost silent and very fast thanks in part to the 8MB cache and 7200 rpm rotation speed. Seagate includes some awesome utilities on the included CD-ROM that make the installation easy for anyone who can follow simple instructions. These are the best installation instructions I have ever seen. Also the Seagate warranty staff are some the nicest people I have ever spoken with. I have not had to send back any hard drives but I have dealt with them a few times in the past regarding other products. For a tape backup device, they actually honored a warranty that was expired by more than 30 days! Cannot recommend Seagate enough. My profession is IT / Sys admin and I use these drives everyday and highly recommend.

Rating:
Summary: works just fine, no problem
Review: what am i supposed to say about an internal HD? reliability is the thing, since I have only had it for a month or so, I can't say there is anything wrong with it. Mostly I got it because seagate is the industry leader and I had never had the chance to buy their product cheap. This time I saw Amazon had a sale on it from WhoSave coom website and it was only like 3GB/$1. I don't think it's too loud, I use it exclusively for storing backups and dvds. I will update the review if something goes wrong with it.

Rating:
Summary: Non-deterministic failure to detect the drive
Review: When I first got the drive, I hooked it up to my Ultra ATA/100 controller and it worked like a charm. I now had a 200GB secondary storage drive. However, after a few days of usage, there would be instances where the drive would not be detected by the Ultra ATA/100 BIOS, causing my primary drive to fail to be detected, thus preventing me from booting up. I thought it was a jumper setting mistake, so I made sure the jumper setting was set to 'slave', but the problem persisted. Note that the problem was non-deterministic, meaning that the drive would be detected *sometimes*. Once the drive was detected, it worked without a problem. So every morning when I booted up my computer, I was left to wonder whether or not the drive would be detected. If the BIOS did not detect the drive on bootup, my only workaround was to shut the computer down for a few minutes, and retry by rebooting it; eventually the drive would be detected.

Obviously, this is not a feasible way of using the drive, and I thought it may be a bad disk cable or power supply cord, and I changed those to no avail. I also removed my primary drive and attempted a fresh install of Windows XP on this Seagate drive, and the same non-deterministic detection problem persisted. Finally, I took the drive to another working system and tested it out, and the same problem occurred. So, I most likely got a "lemon" drive and will have to go through Seagate's warranty program. They better give me a brand new drive!