About this product

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The Seagate Barracuda 160GB hard drive offers high capacity in a package made from sustainable technology. This is accomplished via perpendicular engineering, which allows more data to be loaded into the drive. Each platter inside of the ST3160318AS has an additional layer of material underneath the recording media. When data is passed to the heads from the SATA interface, this hard disk transmits a magnetic field through both layers. Because this increases the storage density of the platters, the ST3160318AS offers a surprisingly light 160GB volume. These special components work with a monopole head to cut down on lag time when working with this unique design. These special considerations make this drive attractive to gamers as well. Intense online games can generate huge average write counts, which can quickly fill up the 160GB capacity. Seagate designed these platters to take that kind of abuse without slowing down. The 7200 RPM spin speed ensures that you have top-notch write and read performance speed, and it also helps you locate documents without lag. The high RPM rate even protects against delayed write errors. The Clean Sweep feature automatically calibrates your drive, and patented Seagate Directed Offline Scan technology runs disk diagnostics. With a world full of malware, spyware, and computer viruses ready to take your system down, protecting your data is more important than ever. These diagnostics automatically note any bad blocks that appear on the Barracuda. Once these blocks are discovered, this special software marks them in use. This prevents your system from writing precious information to them.If the Seagate firmware marked any block bad that already had data written to it, then the Barracuda would automatically move it to prevent further damage. Controller chips inside of the ST3160318AS read data back from the generous 8MB cache. The Barracuda then finds a clean block to write the data. These drives don't give up if they find multiple write failures. The hard drive controller chip will continue to repeat the process until all buffers are cleanly synchronized through the SATA interface.Enhanced G-Force protection defends against other types of data damage. Technologists from Seagate thought of many scenarios that could cause damage and then planned against them. The SoftSonic motor enables whisper-quiet operation, so this an ideal HDD for small form factor desktop machines. The Seagate Barracuda also offers excellent power numbers, which is an important factor to consider when choosing an internal HDD for these machines.Compatibility is another major issue that this hard drive tackles. Because they use the same SATA cables that most modern drives do, you won't have to replace existing wiring when installing them. This also makes networking easy. It is also compatible with adapters for machines that don't have native SATA interfaces. Because it supports both hard and soft links, you can use this HDD with almost any system software. It is compatible with Windows 10 and supports the NTFS file system. Apple users can boot OS X from an HFS+ partition. Seagate also ensured that it is compatible with newer Apple desktop machines. You can format it for the new APFS file structure ushered in by OS Sierra.