These mechanical drives are on the way out it appears. You can inject it with SATA-III technology but mechanical drives are an old technology. However they still work well enough and are pretty reliable.
I'll confess that I don't know a great deal about hard drives.. but I did manage to learn a thing or two while researching the reality of SATA-III performance of mechanical drives. See, I was running my win7 computer with a Fujitsu 2.5 notebook hard drive (SATA-II 7200rpm 320GB about 3 years old) connected to my computer using an external SATA enclosure which was powered from a usb port.
USB 2.0 / eSATA HDD Enclosure For 2.5" SATA Hard Drive With "One Touch Button" Instant Backup In Gold
Believe it or not, it worked flawlessly and as far as I know it's the only way to run win7 from an external drive. The windows index was a 5.8. Now you'd think with all the hype of SATA-III and it's claims of 6GB data transfer rates that this Seagate would at least peform greater than a 2.5" SATA-II notebook drive that was made 3 yeasr ago. Not so. The windows index rated it as 5.9 which I hear is the fastest index rate you can get from a mechanical drive. I don't see any performance increase at all. I just have more space than the 2.5" drive. Plus the drive got returned to the netbook I took it from.
Oh well.. Not a big deal. It looks to me as though mechanical hard drive technology peaked about 4 years ago or maybe even longer. They keep re-inventing SATA technology and selling it in new drives as an improvement. It's not though. In the next couple of years they will vanish entirely from the face of the earth. The good new is, the price of 128GB SSD drives is dropping daily. I see them listed now for about £80. When the time comes, I'll simply turn this into a storage drive. I do think this Seagate is still a great value and I highly recommend it. If you've built yourself an amazing killer gaming system it's going to be your bottleneck. For most people though, it will perform as expected.
| Brand | Seagate |
|---|---|
| Product Dimensions | 14.73 x 10.16 x 2.03 cm; 544.31 Grams |
| Item model number | ST500DM002 |
| Manufacturer | KOMQI |
| Series | 500GB SATA3 |
| Colour | black |
| Form Factor | 3.5-inch |
| Hard Drive Size | 500 GB |
| Hard Drive Interface | ATA133 |
| Hard Disk Rotational Speed | 7200 RPM |
| Wattage | 50 |
| Power Source | No |
| Are Batteries Included | No |
| Item Weight | 544 g |
