SUMMARY: Seagate has been around for a long time as a maker of hard drives. They have had their ups and downs comparatively against other companies, but overall have made a quality product for those looking for either performance drives or a more budget oriented unit. Seagate makes both, but they have just recently released a new drive in their budget U-Series, and TweakTown has the privilege of being one of the first sites to take a look at this behemoth.
The actual drive nomenclature is “Seagate U-Series 6 Model ST380020A”. It features a pair of platters that offer a staggering 80GB of storage space! I think that even the most MP3 oriented among us would have at least a little trouble filling up this drive. It also has four heads to make short work of finding all that data. Add to this a standard 2MB cache buffer, and you can start to see why I became interested in testing this unit.
Seagate claims an 8.9ms average seek time and average data transfers in the 14.5 MB/sec range. We’ll test these figures in a bit to see how close they really are. Not too bad considering that this is only a 5400 RPM drive. While it’s not supposed to be a screamer, I just wanted to see if it would be a viable solution for high capacity storage in a Power System.
One thing that I noticed right off was the sheer weight of this drive. It is just HEAVY! How heavy? How about 680 grams (that’s a full 1.5 pounds for those who are metric impaired). I have been using a 20GB Western Digital and a 40GB IBM drive for a bit now, and this thing is probably as heavy as both of these drives combined. But it will make little difference once you screw it into your case and start enjoying all that space.
Something else that I noticed was a rubber sleeve that was wrapped around the drive. It never hurts to have an added layer of protection, and the sleeve will do very well at this task. It is a full wrap-around type that covers most of the circuitry on the bottom of the drive and protects it from just about everything. No complaints at all about added security of your investment.
Connections on the butt of the drive are standard fare, but since this is classified as a “Budget Drive”, additional features are not needed. It includes the ATA-100 40-pin connection, 5v Molex connector and a small set of jumpers that allow you to set the drive up as a Master or Slave. It also allows you to set it as a Master drive on a system that does not support newer drive specifications. A nice feature for those who have an older system and want to set it up as a server.
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