Site Features @ GameBanshee

The time now is 11:25 PM GMT -6.

Banshee Network

Site Features

	Submit News
	News Archives
	Join Our Staff
	Forums
	Community Blogs
	Reviews
	Previews
	Interviews
	Editorials
	About GB
	Advertise With Us!

Seagate Portable External Hard Drive (40 GB) Review

While it may be difficult to believe, portable storage (other than floppy discs) was popular over a decade ago, chief among the few choices being the Zip drive. But even its prevelance at the time was nothing compared with today's tidal wave of portable media alternatives. With the advent of hi-speed USB 2.0, and to an extent, the older USB 1.1, people can now buy mass storage key cards that simply plug into your USB slot, usually with enough memory for most on-the-go needs.

However, with the boom of digital media such as camcorders and cameras, it's rapidly becoming the case that tech saavy professionals and home users alike will find it useful to hold their large media files or backups (often taking up several gigabytes - much more than keycard storage can currently hold) in a (trans)portable package. Enter the portable hard drives.

Of all of the mass storage portables currently on the market, the Seagate External Portable Hard Drives of 40GB and 100GB stand out heads and shoulders above the rest with regards to aesthetic presentation. In terms of design, consider them the iPod of portable storage, if not quite up to that level yet. Compact at a 1" height, 3.5" width and 5" depth, it features an elegant and distinguishable metallic band around the perimeter, and when turned on, a blue and bright LED that shines through the front. The blue is something rarely seen in today's electronics and is a welcome touch.

The drive is likely to hold its grip to anything you set it on thanks to the two thin highly-tactile rubber strips running in parallel along the bottom of the drive. As heat dissipation comes mainly from the grill along the perimeter, the less than two millimeters from surface to underbelly is not a problem.

Another design plus is in its USB powered operation. There is no need for a separate power cable here; simply plug the unit into your USB slot and it's ready to go. On the off chance that your power supply does not have enough juice to run the hard drive, an additional USB "power only" connector is provided on the included Y-split cord, so that you can use either an additional USB slot or powered USB hub.

I had no problems in powering the hard drive with my USB 2.0 PCI card (my computer is one of the last featuring the older USB 1.1), but when using the USB 1.1 port on my computer, I did need to make use of the additional "power only" connector to supply enough power. In any case, if you are still a USB 1.1 or 1.0 user and are considering using an external hard drive, I strongly suggest upgrading via the use of a fairly cheap PCI or PCMCIA card to add the additional 2.0 slots (giving you usually anywhere from 2 to 5 more USB 2.0 slots).

Performance wise, I will only be looking at 2.0 performance, as USB 1.1 is simply going to be "slow", though still tolerable if you only use your drive as a backup and have a lot of time to wait while transferring back and forth. With the speed of USB 2.0 and the Seagate's 5400 RPM with 2MB cache (40GB model - the 100GB model features an 8MB cache), you will be able to run applications and play games from the Seagate portable HD without issue; well, that's almost true. While installing and then playing the 3D real-time strategy game Warcraft III (install took less than 7 minutes for the whole CD), I experienced the rare drive-seek hiccup, which for a brief instant paused the action on screen and then returned almost immediately. They weren't frequent enough that I would wish to stop playing, and certainly tolerable, but in general any hardware interruptions in gameplay are unwelcome.

While running applications such as MS Word or other common business software may take slightly longer to boot up than from your internal hard drive, you shouldn't notice any performance issues, but then again, the purpose of this drive would likely be more for backup and/or temporary transfer than actual application use anyway. Which brings up the issue of transfer speed.

Being that I tested the 40GB drive (with 2MB cache), I was able to transfer a 1GB file to the portable in 1 minute, 15 seconds. This was well above my personal expectation (roughly based on experience with other external storage) so I was pleasantly surprised. Testing a 2GB file took only slightly longer than twice that amount, and I would estimate from these results that entirely filling up the drive would take significantly less than an hour, depending on the amount of files you have to transfer. Throughout my experience with the drive, it has indeed been "whisper" quiet.

As far as what's in the box, you'll get the hard drive packed in egg crate cardboard, a small but thorough Quick Start Guide, the Y-cord power cable (which is a bit on the short side) with "Power + Data" and "Power Only" connectors on one end, and the hard drive connector on the other, and finally, a utilities CD including the Quick Start Guide on PDF, a DiskWizard program capable of reformatting or partitioning the drive, and a browser based diagnostic tool.

At slightly under four dollars per gigabyte (at current market prices), Seagate's highly polished, compact and refined design will turn a few heads in the office or home, and its USB 2.0 real world performance is excellent for a current portable hard drive solution as well as very quiet, making the entire package highly recommended at either the 40GB or 100GB capacity.