Home ·· News Room ·· Prints ·· Licensing ·· Gallery ·· About Us ·· Contact Us ·· Equipment ·· Services Seagate 400GB Pushbutton One Touch Backup External Hard Drive February 13, 2006
	We have exceeded the capacity of our current external backup, an extern case 120GB 7200 IDE to Firewire (IEEE 1394) converted Western Digital hard disk. We have been relying on this disk as our primary magnetic backup media for our image repository. Because our digital output rate has increased dramatically this year, we have quickly filled our current storage space. This lead us to look for a larger external storage solution. Based on experiences related by other users on the Internet, we chose to purchase the Seagate 400GB One Touch Firewire/USB 2.0 external storage system. It appears that based on the number of failures of the Maxtor One Touch drives related by many user review sites, the Maxtor product would be a higher risk product. Ironically, we just came across user reviews on Amazon that suggest an early 2005 batch of Seagate drives isn't good either. Since there is really only LaCie to consider, we chose to keep the Seagate product and see how it goes. This may seem crazy for a backup and in general it is. The counter to that is there are plenty of stories of all three manufacturer drives failing. What does one do? We make CD-R backups of our material, too. They're quite reliable compared to DVD+/-R multiple standards. Seagate 400GB External Drive Buy it here Installation experience Getting the product box open, you'll find the Firewire cable, USB cable, power block, power cord, instructions and software CD on top. Discarding the cardboard, you'll find a plastic lid covering the drive. Remove the plastic lid and you'll find a environmentally sealed anti-static bag. At this time it will be worthwhile to stumble through the instructions. The instructions are a little aligned to the techie person but a regular user should be able to use it without difficulty. Pull out the power cord, the power block and the Firewire cord to plug into your Mac or PC. We recommend the Firewire if you have it because the true data through-put of the Firewire bus far exceeds that of USB. USB claims 480mbps vs Firewire 400 at 400mbsp, however USB 2.0 has huge overhead so it is nowhere near as fast. Also, the processor usage is much less than that of USB. Tear the foil off the drive by the corner notch and listen to the vacuum seal being broken. Discard the Multisorb air absorber. You'll notice that the drive weighs quite a bit for the small box it's in. Plug in the power cord to the drive and then plug in the Firewire cable to the drive and computer. It doesn't matter which Firewire port you plug the cable into the back of the drive or the computer. Make sure your computer has a 6-pin Firewire port, otherwise the cable that came with the kit will do you no good. If your computer only has a 4-pin Firewire connector, you'll have to purchase a separate 4-pin to 6-pin Firewire cable. To turn on the drive, the instructions say that you should turn off your computer. But then, they don't give a specific power up sequence for your system, either. We found that you can just power up the drive and plug it into the computer. To power up the drive, just hold down the power button on the front of the drive (marked 1/0) until you hear and feel the drive power up. The light on the front of the switch will glow blue. The instructions explicitly state that you should not move the drive at all when it is on. We suggest you follow these instructions if you want your drive to last a long time. Moving hard disks when they are on will only cause them to fail more quickly. There are services to recover your data but they generally start at $1,000US and go up from there. Mac installation experience If you power down your computer, power up the drive then power up the computer. When we had the cables connected between the drive and computer, had the computer on and then turned on the drive, nothing showed up on the desktop. We've had this happen with other drives, too. Just unplug the Firewire cable, making sure the drive light (also the power switch) is not flickering and plug it back into your Mac. It should come up. The drive came up as a yellow Firewire drive with the name SEA_DISK on the desktop. Formatting the drive If you need to format the drive on your Mac, open up your system drive (Mac Drive), then the Utilities folder then the Disk Utilities program. No don't go into Utilities and format just any Seagate drive on your system because some Macs shipped with Seagate drives as their system drive. You do that and your computer will be toast. Under Disk Utilities, our drive came up as a 372.6 GB Initio, SEA_DISK. Choose the Partition tab, choose a drive name under the Name input box (something that makes sense, like "External 400GB") click on the Partition button, say yes to Partition the drive (we did one big partition, we don't want to make things more complicated). This takes a few minutes and you will see the blue light flicker on the drive. The progress bar will stay short for a minute and then flash to done. Strangely, the drive name changed to Untitled then drive2s9. We then went to the Erase tab, changed the name to External400GB, hit erase and the volume name changed to what we wanted. Weird but it worked. The drive now shows up on the desktop as External 400GB. You can test the speed of the drive and play with it now. We moved a 300MB file over from an internal drive to the external in seconds. Nice! Software installation Insert the CD into your drive, click the Mac folder and click the BBE for Mac/Apple button. Then a finder window opens, click BBEMac.dmg. A program will open, double click the huge icon "Install Bounceback Express". Enter your Admin password, Agree, Accept having to restart your computer after installation. When your computer comes back up, click Register Later. Then click Yes when it asks if you have a second drive (you just bought one). Started a 22.8GB backup at 7:45PM. The internal drive on this computer is a 15K RPM Seagate Cheetah 30GB drive. The backup completed at 8:23pm, 38 minutes. Not too bad for 22GB. We now can do incremental backups with Bounce Back Express which means only the files that have changed will be backed up, increasing the speed of backup dramatically. Conclusions The overall user experience was quite good. It's not a totally non-techie experience but it wasn't too bad. You can, with a little guidance, get the drive up and going for general use without trouble. It's nice to have the storage and the drive is good and fast. The next question is reliability. If you search long enough, you will find people having drives die from all different manufacturers. The only solution we have to that is to have multiple backup drives in different locations. This decreases the probability that you will loose everything you have. It's not impossible but very unlikely. Also, we backup to CD-Rs because they are almost rock solid, much better than our DVD experience. Unfortunately CD-Rs are comparatively tiny, six times less storage than DVDs. Hopefully the Blue-Ray/HD DVD format war will play out quickly and their media will be solid. Then there will be a decent choice for optical storage. Until then, we do this backup. Buy it here
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