Breather Hole

Like all other hard disks, the 400GB Barracuda 7200.8 comes with a breather hole. In this case, it's on the underside.

The breather hole allows condensation inside the hard disk to escape as well as equalizes the hard disk's internal pressure with the ambient pressure. So, please make sure you do not occlude the hole when you install the hard disk!

Jumpers And Connectors

At the end of the PCB are the jumper block, SATA interface and SATA power connector (from left to right).

Unlike PATA drives, where the jumper block is used to set the drive as a Master drive or a Slave drive, or to use Cable Select instead; the jumper block in this SATA hard disk is only meant for Seagate's internal use. There's no need to set any jumpers to use this drive.

Total Capacity

Installing the drive was a breeze. No jumper to worry about. Just plug it in and initialize it in Windows XP's Disk Management console. We then gave the drive a capacity check.

As you can see, the 400GB Barracuda 7200.8 hard disk has a total capacity of 400,085,811 bytes. But after formatting it in NTFS, only 400,004,382,720 bytes were available.