Seagate 400 GB Firewire Drive

Submitted by reeses on Sat, 2006-03-25 01:14. | electronics

I bought this because I was shopping at Fry's after returning the AcomData SATA drive. I almost bought the 500 GB FW800 version of the One Touch II, but then I noticed that the 600 GB version of the new One Touch III Turbo was there, and if I was going to spend $150 more on the 500 GB single-spindle unit, why not spend $100 over that for the 600 GB two-spindle unit that would be faster? I.e., I'd spend $150 knowing I'd be unhappy not spending $250, but $250 was too much to blow on "yet another" external hard drive when my wife was with me.

It's adequate, but I have too many firewire drives now -- in all, three drives providing about 1TB of storage hanging off of my Powerbook. This stinks when the Mac decides it needs to stat all the mounted drives for some reason, and all three spin up, and I get to enjoy the spinning beach ball of death.

The performance, according to iozone, is comparable with the Maxtor One Touch II I used to benchmark USB 2.0 vs FW400 performance. I.e., good enough. The only arguably bad thing I've noticed about it (other than its ugly case) is that it doesn't power up on its own after a power outage. Yes, I failed to plug it into the UPS because I was lazy and didn't want to crawl under my desk. However, my laptop didn't notice the outage, I was not home for the outage, but a shell window I had left open was freaking out every time I tried to ls or cd.

I wouldn't include such a bland "review" but for the hilarious promotional merchandising content on the side of the box.

That text on the side, in rather large print, reads:

Movies: 100 two-hour DVD-quality movies.
Video: 400 hours of digital video.
Music: 6665 hours of your favorite songs.
Pictures: 128,000 digital photos.
Games: 200 exciting games.

They were really struggling with that last one, and honestly, I don't think they had their hearts in the penult either. And "Video" sounds a little redudant with "Movies" right above it.

Basically, they're saying,"This drive is great for stealing electronic entertainment content!"

Go Seagate!

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