I needed two IDE hard drives to fill my OWC Mercury Elite enclosure. Initially I was looking to configure the drives in a RAID 1 configuration so I bought two identical drives. The RAID 1 setup was a failure, but I was still able to use the two drives in a single drive configuration. I was using the enclosure with a Mac Mini, which was housed, in my entertainment unit. For this reason, I was looking for some drives that were relatively quiet. Also I was looking for something that had adequate speed. I was using them to backup the Mac Mini and my Powerbook G4 as well as a few websites I host offsite. I had recently purchased a Seagate 160GB 7200RPM IDE drive for a PC and was pretty happy with it. It was relatively quiet and quite fast. I was lucky enough to find a deal on the Seagate 300GB ST3300622A 7200.9 IDE drive. It was on sale at Fry’s/Outpost.com for $139.99 with a $50 mail in rebate bringing the cost down to $89.99. I usually don’t mind rebates as long as I get the money back.

The Seagate 300GB drives arrived in about a week. There’s not too much to say about the drive. It came in retail packaging with an install CD, IDE cable, and a manual. I installed the two drives in a Master/Slave configuration in the OWC Mercury Elite enclosure, which uses a Firewire connection to connect to the Mac Mini. I used Apple Disk Utility to format the drives for Mac OS X HFS+ Journaled. The drives were each divided into three partitions, one for the Mac Mini, one for my Powerbook, and one for a future machine. I use one drive to do backups at noon using rsync and the other drive to do backups at midnight. When booting from the drive I notice a significant increase in speed over the internal drives of both the Mac Mini and Powerbook. This is obviously what should have happened with a much faster 3.5 inch drive.

I only came across one problem when using the drive, but I think it was because of the OWC Mercury Elite enclosure. I was unable to consistently boot from the drive. I needed to manually hold the option key and select the drive each time. I do not think this is the fault of the Seagate, therefore I didn’t really have any problems with the drive. The included CD was not necessary to install the drive into the machine, and in fact I think it only came with software for Windows anyway. The drives are only a little noisy when the drives are pushed to their limits. I put them behind the glass of my entertainment unit and it resolves the issue. When the unit is idle or minimal access, the drive is virtually silent. Overall, the drive worked as intended.

If I were to recommend hard drives I usually suggest either Hitachi or Seagate. Now that the Seagate drives have a 5-year warranty, it sweetens the deal. I have been very happy with my Seagate purchases in the past and so far very happy with the Seagate 300GB ST3300622A 7200.9 IDE drive.