May 09, 2005 - Now that broadband is so pervasive in homes throughout the world and devices like digital cameras and mp3 players have almost entirely saturated the marketplace, users are requiring more and more hard drive space to keep up with all their data. Popping in an addition internal hard drive is one way to go, but adding a large external drive can be beneficial for multiple reasons.

Firstly, an external drive is simple to share between computers, and as many folks have both a desktop and laptop either at home or work, file sharing is a big concern. Secondly, having an external drive for backup purposes can be handy for quickly and easily moving to a new system.

Seagate's latest external hard drives with Pushbutton backup are a perfect fit for this sort of setup. Available in 200GB, 300GB and 400GB varieties, the drives are 3.5" external drives that are available in USB 2.0 and USB 2.0 + Firewire flavors. All three drives spin at 7200-RPM and feature 8MB of cache. We used the 400GB model for testing purposes, but other than size all three drive types are identical.


Measuring a little over 6" x 7" x 2", the drives are able to be stacked vertically if laid on their side, or stood up on end via an included footstand that simply snaps into place. A single drive is small enough that it can easily fit next to a monitor without garbling up much desk space. Note that the drives do require their own power source, so you'll have two cables running from each.

As mentioned, the drives are available with either USB 2.0 plus Firewire connections, or with only USB 2.0. The benefit to using Firewire, other than its lower CPU usage and better performance (see our benchmarks), is that you can use the Pushbutton backup feature. Coupled with BounceBack Express, the drive lets you simply press the button on the front of the enclosure and walk away as your files are automatically backed up.


If you're using the USB 2.0-only drive, or are using the combo drive through its USB 2.0 connector, you'll need to run BounceBack Express manually, though everything after starting the application is automatic. If you're running via Firewire, all you need to do is hit the button and walk away. You're also able to set up scheduled backups of course, automating the routine entirely.