Advice on seagate 120GB ATA100 drive.

douglas · Post by **douglas** » Thu May 13, 2004 10:23 pm

I was at Fry's today, and they have a huge pile of Seagate 120GB ATA/100 drives with 8MB cache. They are selling them for $140, but they come with a $60 rebate, making it an $80 120GB drive, which is a pretty good deal. (of course it will be a long time before you see that $60.)

How do these compare with the Samsung 160GB 1614N drives? I have heard those in action, and I have been puting aside a little cash to pick one up for about $110, which is a pretty good deal also.

I already have 400GB in the machine, and I don't need to access it all times, so I can let the motherboard spin down those drives so the computer would be quiet in idle. Should I grab the slightly smaller cheaper drive, or spend the extra $30 for the samsung spinpoint? Since noise of the drive is what I am mostly concerned about.

shathal · Post by **shathal** » Fri May 14, 2004 2:00 am

You could use them as backup drives?

That's a pretty nifty deal. Wouldn't mind seeing something like that over here (even though I'm historically a marked child when it comes to Seagate...)

.

douglas · Post by **douglas** » Mon May 17, 2004 8:25 am

Well, the deal at Fry's got better, so I just went and did it. The 200GB Seagate went on a 1 day sale from $200 to $150, and it had $80 in rebates, making it a $70 deal on the 200GB drive. So I just bought it.

The idle noise is great, since it is just not there, the drive is silent on idle, less noice than the 5v fans in the case, so I really can't hear it when idle. But the seek noise is there, not really noisy, but certainly the noisest part of the system when the drive is in use. I would say the Samsung Spinpoint is still a better drive, but this one is the equal in idle at least.