Seagate ST96812A notebook drive

galba · Post by **galba** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 2:31 am

Thinking of buying a Seagate ST96812A and looking for any comment by an existing user - at £71.09 inc VAT just £4.00 dearer than the older ST960822A. It's a single platter 2 head 60GB PATA version of the ST9120821AS Mike tested.

In his review Mike remarked that he thought the idle power was high for the ST9120821AS at 3.3W, but suggested this might be the result of it being a 2 platter drive. In fact the data sheet -

http://www.seagate.com/pdf/datasheet/di ... _120gb.pdf

makes no distinction on idle power between 1 and 2 platter drives so I'm wondering if the Seagate figures for the single platter drive are anything more than a rough estimate ? ...and not, I hasten to add, critising Mike's assumption on the question !!

Also noticed from the data sheet that Seagate suggest these drives for use in small form factor PCs, which allays my fears that the 5 year warranty might not apply in these circumstances.

sgrossklass · Post by **sgrossklass** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 10:08 am

The unusually high power dissipation is most likely due to the SATA interface, for which 0.6 W more vs. PATA doesn't seem unrealistic. So a PATA version would not be unusually power hungry, certainly not a single platter version (specs or not).

As for the warranty, you best check this upon receiving the drive. It's better to find out you got an OEM drive at this point than when it fails and it's too late to send it back.

galba · Post by **galba** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:17 pm

sgrossklass wrote: As for the warranty, you best check this upon receiving the drive. It's better to find out you got an OEM drive at this point than when it fails and it's too late to send it back.

Thanks, - it is an OEM drive, - came with nothing but some foam in the box. Didn't know notebook drives were available as a retail product. I'll check with Seagate on the warranty.

Anyway I fired it up today, just lying on a foam pad in the FDD bay in my EX18 SFF and with the case open the drive is virtually silent to my ears, barely a murmur when installing Windows. It's also running very cool and certainly won't contribute much, if anything, to system temperature. I'll check later what Speedfan has to say about the temp, assuming the drive has a sensor.

I'm off down to the haberdasher's tomorrow for some elastic.