Pros & Cons
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- Large storage capacity.
- Convenient.
- Stacking design.
- Secure.
- One-button backup.
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- Software not terribly convenient.
Seagate External Hard Drive (400 GB) Specs
| Ports: | Firewire 400 |
| Ports: | USB |
| Ports: | USB 2.0 |
| Storage Capacity (as Tested): | 400 GB |
| Type: | External |
Seagate has a storage solution for all you digital pack rats out there. The 400GB Seagate External Hard Drive ($399 list) offers a copious reserve of disk space that lets you store and back up your video files, digital photos, music, and more.
Seagate also offers a
The Seagate External Hard Drive is, of course, an easy way to increase the storage capacity on your desktop or notebook without cracking the case open: All you have to do is hook it up to a spare USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 port on your Microsoft Windows PC or Mac, and you now have a 400GB E: (or F: or G:) drive. And it's certainly a faster way to move large video files, especially if you're only using 802.11b wireless networking at the moment.
The Seagate drive comes with CMS Products' BounceBack Express, which is a decent, if simple, backup utility. Once the software is installed, you simply press one button to back up any drive on the local machine to the external hard drive. You can schedule automatic backups and keep several backup sets, but the simple BounceBack Express version lacks some basic features. We would like to see backup with compare, which checks to see if a file on your C: drive has changed. If it hasn't, the application skips over that file to save time. We'd also like to see restore functionality. Without it, you need to search the drive manually and copy the file back yourself to restore a lost file. If the ability to restore were built in, you could easily find the file you wanted from the backup program's search interface. Still, searching BounceBack's internal database is faster than trying to find the file on the external drive manually with the slow Windows "Search" command. BounceBack Professional, which has this functionality and much more, is a $49 upgrade available from CMS Products' Web site.
The Seagate External Hard Drive takes up very little desk space. It can sit vertically, with the included stand, or horizontally, which lets you stack multiple units using the well-designed nesting system. Like most external drives, there is a power brick to deal with, but at least the cord is long enough to reach the floor.
For business users, the Seagate drive can be an inexpensive way to secure sensitive data. When the office is open, you can hook the drive up to a shared computer or small server; when the office is closed, you can lock it up in the safe, so it is inaccessible to hackers and other malicious users. It can also be part of a backup routine that transports the data off-site, which we recommend for irreplaceable data.
Running FutureMark's PCMark04 tests and our own Winbench99 disk tests show that the Seagate drive is a good performer. It was speedy across the entire drive surface, which indicates that performance is limited only by the interface. It works a bit faster with FireWire, but USB 2.0 should be plenty fast for daily backups.
The Seagate drive also offers much more space and simpler software than our previous Editors' Choice, the
As a data repository for your digital life, a convenient way to increase the storage on your desktop or laptop, or as a means to sneakernet your data around the home or office, the Seagate External Hard Drive is a very good addition indeed.
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Benchmark Test Results
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