You Gotta Get a Seagate
Written: Jan 21 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: lots of storage for small(ish) price, good speed once moving
Cons: slow access speed, sometimes not recognized by Windows at startup
The Bottom Line: If you need a decent external drive, this is a good, reliable choice.
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| martytdx's Full Review: Seagate (ST3300601CB-RK) 300 GB FireWire 400 (1394... |
As a photographer with 2 digital SLR carmeras (a Nikon D200 and a D70), I take a lot of pictures - which means that I need a lot of storage. Despite having a 100GB Seagate main hard drive and a 250GB Seagate backup drive, I've been struggling for space (2,000 unprocessed picture will do that). My wife was in a similar situation, so we looked for another solution. Another thing we wanted to have was something we could use to take files between our PCs and our laptop - hence an external hard drive made sense.
[ • seagate is the ONLY WAY • ]
I really don't like Western Digital drives and loathe Maxtor hard drives - but I really like Seagate drives (between us, 8 of the 13 hard drives we have are Seagate, and those that aren't are usually the original drives on the computer). So when we started looking, Seagate was the first one we looked at. It just so happened that a few weeks ago, Best buy was having a great sale - a 300GB external hard drive for only $149.99. For an external drive and that much space, it was a deal - especially when other nearby drives were $200 for internal drives with less storage). We were sold.
[ • 300gb please, TO GO • ]
The drive comes prepackaged in a nice case designed to stand up on any fashionable desk. The case is a sleek, thin and futuristic design - not anything as stylistic as the Mac minis but still pretty nice. It comes with a small stand for vertical set up, the preferred position. As for the associated cables, there are 4 of them - a two-part power cord (about 8') and a USB cable connection (about 4') and a Firewire cable for Mac users. Despite the title on Epinions, this drive is usable on both PCs AND Macs.
[ • that's a lot OF DRIVE • ]
So, 300GB sounds like a lot, right? It is, although not the biggest on the market - Seagate also makes 500 and 750GB versions, and have a 1 Terabyte (TB) drive due this spring. But for now (and for the price) we were pretty happy. I sat down, hooked up the cables and pressed the power button. Within seconds, Windows XP (SP2) recognized the drive and had me ready to go. No extra software, no partitioning, no fuss.
Space » This drive uses a 3.5" drive platter to save your information. When you take a look at the actual space you have to work with shows about 279GB, but that's more a glitch in the way that Windows reads data size.¹ You lose a lot less than a gig for what the drive needs to run itself - meaning you have 299GB to fill up with the rest of your stuff. According to Seagate, that means you can get (approximately) 5,000 hours of digital music, 96,000 digital photos (ha! not in RAW, you won't), 300 hours of digital video or 150 exciting games. What it means to me is that my main drive is no longer holding onto 50 GB of pictures that I haven't gotten through yet.
Speed » The drive is a 7200RPM drive, so it's fairly fast but not the fastest drive on the market. Once it's running, it does a fairly good job of moving data both internally and from my other drives (it is a backup drive, after all). This drive isn't perfect though. I don't know how much to attribute to it being an external vs. internal hard drive, but it seems slower to access than my internal SATA drives (most likely, I'm just spoiled by the faster SATA speeds).
But the initial access time, particularly after not using it for a bit, is noticeably slow - probably 8-10 seconds from a standby mode. Also, when booting up my computer, the drive is recognized as a removable hard drive, which means that I have to wait for Windows to recognize it before I can access the files. And sometimes, after the drive has been idled for a bit, I actually have to power the drive down and back up to get it recognized. Annoying, actually.
Reliability » Well, I've only had it for a month, and other than what I mentioned above, I've not had any problems - and I really don't expect to. I've had great success with all of my Seagate drives, and while this is an external instead of an internal, I really don't expect much to happen wrong here. But if it does, the drive comes with a 1-year warranty and free technical support even after the warranty expires.
Other » I will say that this drive is pretty quiet - other than the initial start up sounds when you first 'wake' it, it is whisper-quiet while accessing files. Nice feature to have when it's sitting so much closer to you than your normal internal drive.
[ • tech SPECS • ]
Speed: 7200 rpm
Cache: 8MB
Size: Horizontal - 7.125" D x 6.5" W x 2.25" H || Vertical - 7.125" D x 3" W x 6,75" H (with pedestal)
Weight: 2lb., 9.5oz
Compatibility: Windows & Mac
Included software: SeaTools diagnostic
Warranty: 1-year full guarantee and free technical support
[ • final THOUGHTS • ]
If you have the money and space, I would recommend getting an internal SATA drive from Seagate because it will be faster and quicker to access. But if you want a good, reliable drive that also gives you the flexibility of portability, this is a good drive to consider.
[ • notes • ]
¹ Hard Drive 'Space' - Windows, for some reason, interprets the size of a byte differently than the manufacturers; the manufacturers use a scale based on a kilobyte being 2x10th power (1024) bytes, but windows considers underestimates by a factor of 1.0737)
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
martytdx
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 - Top 200 |
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Member: Marty
Location: New Jersey
Reviews written: 481
Trusted by: 179 members
About Me:
Doing what I can to try new places, restaurants, books and beers.
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