When we last visited Seagate’s external backup drive (the company’s product-naming department must be understaffed these days), it sported a mere 160GB courtesy of the company’s seventh-generation 7,200rpm hard drive. Seagate just released a second-gen backup unit, replete with its heavily revised eight-generation drive, the 7200.8.

The new drive is a wee bit faster than the one it replaced, but the biggest improvement is its massively increased capacity. At 400GB it’s the biggest single-drive backup unit available. The drive sports a ho-hum 8MB buffer.

The drive’s chassis offers a single USB 2.0 port and two FireWire ports for daisy-chaining devices. It’s a shame there’s not an extra USB port as well, but there is a handy button on the front of the plastic housing that launches a predefined backup routine when depressed. Along with the drive upgrade, Seagate has switched the backup software from Dantz Retrospect to CMS BounceBack Express. This isn’t really an upgrade, however, as BounceBack is a pared-down program. It backs up your machine without letting you dig into the myriad backup options that were previously available.

Of course, some of those options were unnecessary, so this isn’t such a bad thing. In fact, BounceBack is very capable and extremely easy to use, and for backup software, we prefer simplicity, so the software switch was actually a wise move on Seagate’s part. Still, BounceBack does have a few quirks: If you set up a backup routine, then switch your drive to use the other interface (USB to FireWire, or vice versa), you have to reinstall the software and set up your backup routine all over again to make it work properly.

Besides the software oddities, our only complaint with this drive is that it’s very loud during seek operations. If you want the drive to perform backups while you sleep, make sure it’s in another room, otherwise it’ll keep you up all night. The good news is that this drive is an exceptional value. At press time, the external drive costs the same as the internal drive, so you’re getting the chassis, connectors, and software for free.
—Josh Norem

HUMONGOUS DRIVE: Easy to use, huge capacity, and reasonably price.

HUMONGOUS ASS: Quirky software, noisy seeks.

Month Reviewed: August 2005
Verdict: 9
URL: www.seagate.com