Seagate 750GB Recertified Hard Drive Review

Storage/HDD by SidneyWong @ 2008-02-20

Today a 1000GB hard drive is commonly available for the power users while a few months back 750GB was the largest capacity. Although hard drive failure is low at less than 2 percent, certified repaired hard drive could be had for much less. Geeks.com stocks both new and certified repaired hard drives; and if backing up your data and system are your priorities after HDD failure, a second large capacity HD may be your best friend.

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Performance

Performance:

To setup the hard drive, I use Acronis hard drive clone which takes about 20 minutes in my case depending on the size of data. Otherwise, it would have been a long process. Normally, for Windows operating system and office software, it would only be 10 minutes or less.

Test Sytem:
  • Intel E4500 CPU
  • Nvidia 7600GT graphic card
  • ASRock 4Core1600P WiFi+ mainboard
  • Transcent PC6400 2x1GB memory
  • Windows XP Pro
  • OCZ 420Watt Power supply

Madshrimps (c)


Once again, let me remind you about hard drive size...

One thing to keep in mind is that hard drive companies advertise their size with the idea of 1Mb = 1000Kb, same as 1Gb = 1000Mb, instead of the technically correct: 1Gb = 1024Mb. Hence a hard drive rated by them at 500Gb can only hold ~488Gb when we convert it to the actual size. When formatting to a file system you’ll see a further size reduction, hence when we formatted the RAID 0 stripe with 2x500Gb the actual size in Windows was not 1000Gb but 931Gb. For more information about actual HD space check this article.

Madshrimps (c)


About 715GB net capacity is what we could get from 750GB.

Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)


Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)


Performance wise, average read speed the 750GB seems to be the best. The burst speed is definitely reserved for marking folks, which does not correlate to daily practical use. I reconfirmed HD Tach average speed using Sandra resulting 64MB versus 65MB, pretty close.
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Comment from Sidney @ 2008/03/14
Comment from jmke @ 2008/03/14
that's quite a bit of value for money, put two in RAID 1 for security and fast read speeds

 

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