I understand the principle, but it seems pretty pointless for a small increase in speed and decrease in seek time. If you want performance, buy an SSD, that's where it's all at these days especially if you go with PCI-e SSD's. You can expect transfer speeds in excess of 750MB/s with a decent one.

Also because manufacturers calculate size in Metric (Power of 1000) where as the operating system calculates it in Binary (Power of 1024)

Manufacturers are beginning to put the Binary HDD size in very small writing on the HDD now

Well that too, but you do lose some in the file system too.

Yea that's true, after a format you lose even more

But take for example my 1TB HDD, Windows reports it as 931GB, thats a huge loss because of conflicting standards

Mine's a 300GB..

I assume that is pretty big for an old Windows Vista box from 2007.

How long have you had that seagate for? ive went through 4 of those drives within this year.

Wasn't there a firmware update for the 7200.11 due to a high failure rate?

Also, this might be handy:
http://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/

For certain drives there was, but it wasn't because the drives were failing it's because under certain conditions they would become "bricked". I wouldn't trust a Seagate with anything these days after losing 6 drives in 3 months (all less than 1 month old each).

Yeah, donate me a few hundred more and we have a deal

I do get your point though, but it's very easy to go back to any size whenever I want.
Again, this is just curious testing and so far the results seem to be true, this is a lot faster this way.

My Desktop:
1x 300 Gb. SATA 150 Mb\s (7200 RPM)-Maxtor
1x 80 Gb. IDE 133. (7200 RPM)-Seagate

My Tablet:
1x 40 Gb. IDE (5400 RPM)-IBM
1x 16 Mb. SD card (No spinning disks!)-PNY

My laptop
1x 6 Gb. IDE (4500 rpm)-Hitatchi

My server
1x 4.5 Gb. SCSI (10k RPM)-Western Digital
2x 6 Gb. SCSI; 1x 7200 RPM, 1x 10K RPM-Conner & Quantum
1x 8 Gb. SCSI (10K RPM)-Seagate
1x 2 Gb. SCSI (10K RPM)-Both Conner

My Mactell XB-203/MT
1x 20 Gb. IDE (5400 Rpm)-Quantum
external 4 Gb. SCSI (??? RPM)-LaCie (Quantum)

My Supermac c500e\180
1x 10 Gb. IDE (5400 Rpm)-Maxtor

My AST
1x 1.2 Gb. IDE (??? RPM)-Western Digital

My iMac
40 20 Gb. IDE (5400 RPM)-Quantum

The oldest working hard drive I own is a Seagate 10 Mb. I have never had a Seagate crash. (I have had 6 Western Digital crashes!)

Fair enough, though I'd still class it as a "failure" since the drive is unusable by average end-user standards.

Every manufacturer has their bad series of drives.

IBM 75GXP
Quantum CX
Quantum Empire 1080
Seagate 7200.11
Maxtor 5T0XXH6
---(add yours here)---

I've seen many consistent & common failures of various series of drives over the last 15 years. I still swear by Hitachi (formerly IBM HDs). Personally, I don't trust WDs.

I guess it depends on each person's personal experience. I've looked over many forums to find nearly every manufacturer torn to shreds by those who've had bad experiences.

IMHO hings went south around 2000 when entry level HDs went from 3-5 year warranties to 12 months. Several manufacturers went "belly-up" and/or were bought out by competitors. Quantum, Maxtor, Conner, IBM etc.

I cringe these days to see cheap USB-2 externals for USD$83. What quality are we getting for that?

Hitachi haven't done that badly, their modern drives seem very good. However I still swear by Samsung who have an outstanding record so far. Their only let down is the lower than most warranty of 3 years. WD offer 5 years on all of their drives. I'm unsure about other brands.

You'd be surprised but most externals are a variety of brands, so it's hit or miss whether you get a good one. If you want a guaranteed brand, make sure you buy an external that is branded so.

My Desktop:
2x 500 Gb. SATA 7200 RPM
1x 1500 Gb. SATA 7200 RPM
Both WD, second named "green"

My laptop
1x 160 Gb. IDE (5400 rpm)

Actually, for a 160 GB Hard Drive, it's (160 GB)10^9(2^-30)(GiB)(GB)^-1 ~ 149.01 GiB
And for a 1.5 TB Hard Drive, it's (1.5 TB)10^12(2^-40)(TiB)(TB)^-1 ~ 1.36 TiB

P3:
120gb 7200
200mb Maxtor drive (from 1992)

Athlon 64:
2x160gb 7200rpm drives. 1 maxtor, 1 hitachi.

Toshiba Laptop:
320gb 5400rpm

Dell Laptop:
640gb 5400rpm Seagate Momentus drive. I have to say it's not quick, just got a tonne of storage.

Then I have a 60gb drive in my PS3 that needs an upgrade as has like 80mb of space on it

And an external 500gb laptop sized Buffalo 5400 drive.

Only ever had 1 drive fail. A 10gb drive from 1999. And that died some time in 2005/2006.

160 gigs.

On my computer, i have old 200 GB disk 5400 ot

on laptop only 80 GB

On my desktop, I have a 750GB SATA2 that has around 300GB free. How I managed to use a PC with a 15GB I still don't understand.

How I ever used a PC without a hard drive I still don't understand.

By booting it from either removable media, an optical disk, or a floppy disk maybe (or from a network)?

Heh, try a cassette.

I have 500gb sata hard disk in my laptop........not interested to get another....

A total of 320 gb!

Just threw this together a couple months ago:

4x Seagate 2TB Barracuda LP drives in a RAID 5, eSATA.

Total: 5.78TB

Plenty of storage space for betas, and anything else I'd want within the next two years of so.

80 Gb Sata and a 160 Gb sata that the factory did not formatted lol