Seagate ST3500601XS-RK 500GB eSATA External Hard Drive
See it at Amazon.com for $399.99Average Customer Rating
(5.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(4 out of 5)Bad Start for a Good Drive
I've been using this drive for about a month now. Mostly I am quite happy with it.
This is a true eSATA drive and runs, on my system, about twice as fast the other external USB2 and Firewire drives that I have hooked to my main computers. As expected, it also seems noticeably faster than either of my external SCSIs - but have not actually measured the throughput on these drives.
It comes with a Promise eSATA controller which installs on the PCI bus. The Promise card seems to have solid drivers as they installed with no problems or conflicts on my XPP/2 system, and have remained stable.
Two things keep me from giving this drive five stars.
First, the backup software shipped with it is bug-ridden, unstable, and crash prone. Though this does not detract from the drive (I have several other backup programs) it none-the-less is sold as part of the package, and needs to be considered if you do not have alternate software available.
I would give the included backup software NO stars, as it crashes so frequently that it is useless. This is noted on reviews on other sites as well, so it seems not something unique to my system. Why such poorly performing software is included is beyond understanding.
The other negative is the power switch.
The power switch automatically resets to the default "OFF" position when the mains power to the drive is cut. This switch must then be pressed (and held for a few seconds) when attempting to power the drive up again, and is successful only AFTER the computer has reached some (as yet to me unclear) point in bootup.
This might seem minor. However, I have two computers that I use as one - controlled by a KVM switch. Between them they have 10 external hard drives variously connected (video, and photography). If I had to restart each of these drives when starting my system it would take a significant amount of time to simply get the drives spinning. The other nine start when power is restored, this one does not: it just sits there cold, dead, unnoticed.
I have never seen such a needless "feature."
Almost invariably I forget to turn the drive on until I need it, for it is used only for backup of in-process videos/images. By then, if I have stuck in a USB keydrive, the drive letter assignment has changed (XPP does not seem able to actually reserve the letter I assign to the eSATA drive if a new keydrive is inserted) so then have to go and change the drive letter assignments so that my batch files will work.
Frustrating and needless interruption of workflow!
The power switch should simply stay in whatever position the user leaves it in. This irritates me almost enough to give the drive THREE stars, but it is better than that.
The lame power switch, and DOA software package, keeps this drive from warranting 5 stars; but, it is fast and large enough to be of use for even video-editing requirements.
(5 out of 5)eSATA for SA8300HD, Good Fit
This drive works flawlessly with Scientific Atlanta's SA8300HD DVR and Time-Warner's SARA v. 1.88.17.a100. Setup was a breeze, requiring only an extra reboot of the DVR to start enjoying all of the extra storage space for High Def programming. Highly recommended in the stated configuration.
(5 out of 5)Excellent Choice
I bought this Seagate for a backup and have had it for about 2 months now. I am very pleased with it. I leave it on 24/7. 99% of the time the fan is off. It does turn on occasionally for cooling however when it is on I can hardly hear it. The software that comes with it will backup your hard drive however, this backup will NOT restore to a new hard drive in case your HD crashes. You must also purchase Ghosting Software like Acronis True Image. This will make a bootable copy of your hard drive. Also purchase Acroinis Disk Director Suite so you can partition your backup drive. Then you can have one partition as your C:\ drive image and the other partition can do a nightly backup of My Documents. Works like a charm. Don, St. Charles, IL.
(4 out of 5)Very Cool
This Drive is very cool. I installed the included pci card in a computer I built over 5 years ago and it works great.
The only thing I don't like is there does not seem to be a way to control the hard drives "sleep mode" behavior. It goes in and out of sleep mode far to frequently; many simple tasks such as emptying the windows xp recycle bin are often delay several seconds due to this.
Regardless, I still like the drive a lot.
(5 out of 5)Increase DVR Storage Easily
I recently purchased this external drive for my Scientific-Atlanta HD8300 DVR cable box to increase my HD storage capacity. Following directions found online for installation for this cable box, installation was flawless. The SATA interface works without a problem, the drive is quiet. In a nutshell the drive does the job!