Seagate 500GB eSATA External Hard Drive Review
Features of the Seagate 500GB eSATA External Hard DriveWhat's in the Box Inside the package with the Seagate 500GB eSATA External Hard Drive you get the following items:
External Drive Internally the drive inside the external enclosure is the Seagate ST3500641AS 500GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gb/s drive that features NCQ. This is the same exact drive you would buy from Seagate if you wanted a 500GB internal HDD. If you use the PCI eSATA card Seagate includes with the drive, you will be able to get the full 3.0 GB/s speed.
Out of the box the drive is ready to be used and formatted with FAT32 file system. For my testing since I run Windows XP Pro, I reformatted the drive to NTFS via Windows Disk Manager. Seagate offers two different ways you can place the drive, they include a black plastic stand that allows the drive to be free standing and they built in a circular indention on one side of the drive along with a raised circle of the same diameter on the other side of the drive. This allows you to stack multiple drives on or under your desk if one drive isn't enough.
On the rear of the drive has the port for the power supply as well as the drives eSATA connector. eSATA cables look very similar to internal SATA cables, though the do not interchange due to different connectors on the cable ends. As with all eSATA drives, the Seagate 500GB external HDD is hot swappable, meaning it can be unplugged and plugged in without turning your PC off.
On the front of the Seagate drive you get a simple and clean interface with nothing more than a power switch that is backlit with blue LED for visibility in a dark room.
Backup Software Seagate includes backup software as well as other utilities on the disk with the drive. BounceBack is the name of the backup application that is included. The application appears to look for any Seagate drive be it internal or external to backup to. I have a 750 GB Seagate internal drive BounceBack recognized as well as the 500GB external. I also have a 1TB Maxtor external connected that was not recognized by the application.
You can choose the frequency of the backups and if you would like them to be fully automatic or if you want to execute them manually. The cool part is that if you choose to execute the backups manually, the software can be set to remind you at preset intervals. Once you make your choices you are ready to begin your backup.
Seagate 500GB eSATA External HDD Installation & Use With my Windows XP computer there were no drivers required for the drive to be recognized. I simply connected the power to the drive and connected the eSATA cable between the PC and the HDD. My Abit AW9D-Max has a on-board eSATA port so I used that rather than the included PCI card. When running ATI CrossFire dual graphics cards, the mainboard doesn't have a accessible PCI slot.
Benchmarking the Seagate 500GB eSATA External Hard Drive I ran my typically battery of tests on the Seagate eSATA drive including Sandra 2007 and ran some real world performance tests by moving a large folder to and from the drive and timing the process with a stop watch. I also timed how long it took to completely back up my system containing 28.8GB of data. Sandra 2007 For testing with Sandra 2007 I used the removable storage benchmark test. The test results were as follows: Benchmark Results Performance Test Status 512B Files Test 32kB Files Test 256kB Files Test 2MB Files Test 64MB Files Test Endurance Test Status Endurance Benchmark Breakdown Drive
Real World Tests For the real world testing I copied the 1.03GB folder to and from the drive and came up with the following times:
I also timed the backup software as it backed 28.8GB from my PC and it took 1:17:52 to backup the entire computer. HD Tach I also ran HD Tach on the Seagate eSATA drive with the following results:
To compare the speeds I opted to compare to an internal drive since the eSATA uses the same sort of bus as the SATA drives inside most systems. HD Tach gave me the following results on a Seagate 750GB internal drive:
Verdict External drives like the Seagate eSATA 500GB are fantastic. This eSATA drive is as close as you will get to internal drive speeds from an external drive. It is important to note that if your system doesn't have an on-board eSATA port you will have to open your system up and install the included PCI card, which negates a bit of the appeal of external drives to some users. That said, this is the fastest external drive I have tested to date and it worked flawlessly. The included backup software works well and is easy to use. It's hard to find fault with the Seagate eSATA drive it's fast, has lots of storage and is easy to setup.
Test System Specifications:
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