From Newegg, I ordered a 320GB Seagate IDE drive
with 16MB cache and the new perpendicular storage
method and a host of other kewel sounding features
that sound revolutionary and state of the art. It had
18 Reviews and almost all of them 5 star, so I said
what the heck. The price…NINETY FOUR DOLLARS.
That’s like (grabs calculator) 3.4 GB per dollar.
So it has been what, two weeks since I got the Seagate
320 GB drive? I also purchased (as part of a combo
offer New Egg was running) an external USB 2.0 enclosure
for the thing. Rosewill USB 2.0 aluminum chasis, black.
I have to say that the drive is extremely quiet and despite
reviews on New Egg saying that the drive runs hot, I have
not experienced any unusual temps. Even in the tight
external enclosure, it got warm, but not hot to the touch.
I was surprised that the speed was so high using a USB
interface. I was getting speeds as high as 32MB/s peak
and typically 27MS/s avg continuous. To compare, my
IDE ata 100 drive is typically 56-64 MB/s.
I did notice that the USB interface dropped out
occasionally. Like once every 4-5 hours.
This may have been due to the not-as-tight-as-id-like
usb connector plugged into the back, or the extension
cable I was using.
Because so many applications are
linked to data on this drive, it causes some frustration
under long term use, so I moved it to a removeable
drive bay on my PC instead and it has run flawlessly.
Still, I am impressed with the Rosewill USB enclosure and
will use it with another drive for file xfers and whatnot.
After a bit of prunning and removing redundant files, I was
able to get the entire contents of my Eight Drive fileserver
and backup of my Laptop files onto the drive and still have
room to spare. It’s much easier to organize things into
one BIG box than several smaller ones.
Pray for me if this drive unexpectedly goes belly-up but
in the mean time I highly recommend this drive.