Seagate Starts to Sell Serial ATA-150 HDDs in the US Retail

by Anton Shilov
03/25/2003 | 03:15 AM

More than four months after Maxtor started to sell its DiamondMax HDDs in Japanese retail (see this news-story), Seagate Technology announced that it now supplies its Serial ATA-150 hard drives to retail consumers in the USA via BestBuy channels.

The HDDs are packed in boxes with special bundle that includes software and installation tips. Advanced users will hardly ever need those, whereas average consumers might benefit from getting these little bit more expensive hard disk drives.

Seagate includes the following into the package:

• Serial ATA data cable and power cable;
• DiscWizard software that offers easy, step-by-step installation, tailored to a user’s personal PC setup;
• SeaTools software that helps users find the real source of PC or drive issues and thus avoid the misdiagnosis and unnecessary return of hard drives;
• Installation instructions are printed right on the drive, a video installation tutorial is on CD, plus a quick and easy installation guide gets users up and running fast;
• SeaShell package that protects against over 1000Gs shock during handling, preventing damaged drives.

The HDDs Seagate offers to the US retail clients are not the new-generation devices, but the good-old Barracuda ATA V with 7200rpm SoftSonic motors, 8MB cache buffer and 9.4ms average seek time.

Currently Seagate offers 80 and 120GB HDDs for $159 and $199 respectively. Prices in online stores are a little bit lower than in BestBuy, moreover, according to our own price-search engine over here, Seagate also sells its Barracuda 7200.7 HDDs with Serial ATA-150 support.