Seagate 500GB eSATA External HDD

Extended Use:

After running our suite of tests, we used the drive as a replacement for our normal USB 2.0 hard drive that we use for storing our benchmarking suite. We don’t run our benchmarks from the drive – it just acts as a central place to store the data before copying the data to a partition on the OS drive. Not surprisingly, we noticed that copying our benchmarks across was noticeably quicker than with the USB 2.0 drive, thanks to the added eSATA speed.

The drive was fully hot-swappable using both the Promise eSATA300 TX2 and also the various eSATA controllers we plugged the drive into - providing you have the latest drivers for the controllers. However, there are still motherboards coming through our labs that don’t come with eSATA ports, meaning that you’re going to have to install the Promise controller card in several instances.

One problem we foresee is not directly Seagate’s problem, but it does show that this device has its limitations. The trend that we’re starting to see in the motherboard industry is that, more and more, motherboards are coming with less than two PCI slots.

If a motherboard has two PCI slots, it won’t be too much of a problem if you’re only using a single video card, or a pair of single-slot video cards. Typically, though, one of the PCI slots is blocked if you use a pair of dual-slot video cards in either SLI or CrossFire mode, and it’s entirely possible that the remaining PCI slot is occupied by a dedicated sound card. If that is the case, and you don’t have eSATA ports on the rear I/O panel, you’re not going to be able to use this drive in an elegant manner.

Final Thoughts...

It’s fair to say that Seagate has manufactured an incredibly fast external hard drive, with speeds rivalling (and even surpassing) internal hard drive performance here. That is undoubtedly a commendable achievement, but where this device falls down is in its cross-platform flexibility and that isn’t necessarily Seagate’s fault.

eSATA is in its infancy and until its support is widespread, it is up to Seagate to ensure that the drive works on a wide range of platforms; thus making it a big shame not to see a USB 2.0 port on the back of the drive as a fall back for machines that don’t support the eSATA standard. In saying that, it’s a nice touch to see an eSATA controller card included in the box, but unfortunately that only caters for one machine and doesn’t cater for notebooks that don’t support the standard without an additional PCMCIA card.

The drive will set you back just under £170 including VAT, which is around £45 more than an internal 500GB Barracuda 7200.10 drive. However, that’s not the comparison we should be making. There aren’t too many eSATA drives out on the market at the moment, but Iomega’s 500GB eSATA/USB 2.0 drive was one that came to our attention when searching around. It’s available on Dabs for less than the price of Seagate’s drive, too.

It looks great on paper, as it comes with support for eSATA and USB 2.0 on the back. Like Seagate, Iomega has also included an eSATA controller card just in case your motherboard doesn’t support the standard. Without testing that device though, we’ll have to reserve judgement on it for the time being – hopefully we’ll be able to have a look at it in the near future.

If you have machines with eSATA capability and you're not worried about notebook compatibility, then the Seagate is an attractive option. We think, however, that most will prefer to stay on USB 2.0 for now and put up with the slightly slower transfer as a trade off for the compatibility.