Seagate 120GB External Storage
by Purav Sanghani on September 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Introduction
A few weeks back, we looked at an external storage device from AcomData, which used a 320GB Western Digital hard drive. It was quite a product for any to top considering its great looks, but now, we have something to which to compare it in performance.
Seagate was kind enough to send us a sample of their 120GB external storage-only (no push button backup) device to test out and we can finally begin our quest to find the top external storage devices of the year. Since the AcomData unit was of higher capacity than our Seagate test unit, we cannot compare apples to apples here, but we are trying to get a general sense of how external devices act over the USB and FireWire medium no matter what 3.5” hard disk drives are being used.
A few weeks back, we looked at an external storage device from AcomData, which used a 320GB Western Digital hard drive. It was quite a product for any to top considering its great looks, but now, we have something to which to compare it in performance.
Seagate was kind enough to send us a sample of their 120GB external storage-only (no push button backup) device to test out and we can finally begin our quest to find the top external storage devices of the year. Since the AcomData unit was of higher capacity than our Seagate test unit, we cannot compare apples to apples here, but we are trying to get a general sense of how external devices act over the USB and FireWire medium no matter what 3.5” hard disk drives are being used.
Click to enlarge.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
14 Comments
View All Comments
foot167 - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
I just returned the 300GB model today after 3 weeks of use. Everything I read about them said they were terrible but I had to give them a shot anyway. Sometimes my computer wouldn't recognize the drive. it would say no drive there. then on monday the drive decided that it was unformatted and needed to be reformatted. good thing that i kept a copy of everything i put on the external on my internal drives.the 300gb one can be had for under $200 and even less after rebates.
How about some reliability tests on these drives. Does the firewire/usb interface affect the reliability of these drives? Are they prone to crashing for some reason?
ScottyDog - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
I agree with your comments about reliability with these external drives. I have one and have the same problems with the disk suddenly becoming "unformatted". I have done a google search and this is a huge problem with these external USB or Firewire chipsets whether they are are the Oxford or Prolific flavors.Somebody really needs to do an article about what is going on here as I have resorted to leaving my drive off unless I am doing a backup and then need to restore otherwise all my data gets destroyed.
I originally thought it might be due to write caching and changing it to safe mode but it makes no difference with mine. If I leave it on eventually it becomes "Unformatted".
type this into google and you will see this is a wide spread problem with these external drives: windows delayed write failure
Googer - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
Dosen't it have 1394? I won't buy an External HDD with out 1394a and/or 1394b.MASCARNHAS - Monday, June 21, 2010 - link
I've used Report and although its great, I've had better luck with WheresTheFreeSpace. It is Modeled after a PC application that is very popular called <a href="http://www.wheresthefreespace.com">Treesiz... (but its for Mac).</a>