Home > Consumer Reviews > Seagate eSATA External Hard Drive - Hard drive - 500 GB - external - eSATA - 7200 rpm - buffer: 16 MB

Excellent service. My order came so quickly I was surprised. It was securely packaged and in great shape. I'll purchase from this vendor again. GREAT

I already have three 300 GB Seagate External Drives. They are excellent, dependable, quiet, and fast. The 500 GB is the same, just larger capacity. When I need another external drive, I plan to purchase another Seagate eSATA model like the four I have.
FWP

This has been a great external drive for both my Mac and PC. I use if for a back up drive.
I ordered a second one and hooked it up to my DirecTV box for a bigger hard drive (like I need to save any more TV shows). It is quiet, fast and easy to use.

I bought this unit to add badly needed additional capacity to my Scientific Atlanta HD cable box/DVR which came with a 40 gb drive. If you have a DVR you know how addictively convenient they are, and how quickly you can fill up the standard capacity. Most DVRs have a little socket on the back of the unit with an eSATA label. It is small-less than half the size of a USB socket. My cable company (Time Warner) does not officially support the attachment of an external drive, so you won't get any tech support directly from them. I have been told that the age of the box may be a limiting factor if the firmware is not very recent the port may not be active.

This drive was perfect for my needs-it is compact, nearly invisible when nestled between equipment(it has a black case rather than the grayish one in the photo) except for the blue activity light,and it is nearly silent at my normal viewing distance. You will need to purchase a cable (Amazon carries those) to hook this up. Through trial and some error, I found that my DVR would recognize the external drive if I powered down the box and unplugged it from AC power. Then I hooked up the drive, turned it on, then powered the cable box back up. That caused a reboot, and it recognized the external drive. Initially, it did not show any additional capacity (the percentage of space used was unchanged), but by the next day it correctly included the external drive capacity. This drive is a simple way to greatly increase your DVR storage capcity. Highly recommended. Unfortunately, this particular model is discontinued, but look for an external drive with an eSATA interface from Seagate (or manufacturer of your choice) and you should be fine.

It seems like the 'market' is now moving to external SATA hard drives
that interface via USB or Firewire but using an eSata interface seems
to offer the advantage of faster data transfers.

I take a fair number of relatively high resolution digital pictures
and that means a lot of data to be stored (for 'safety' I keep
duplicates on two different drives).

An advantage that this package offers is that it includes a
Promise Technologies dual-port eSata interface card (PCI bus).
If you've got a 'desktop' PC (with an available PCI slot), and
need a couple of external eSata interfaces, and you can use an
external standalone eSata interfacing hard drive, then this may
be a good choice.

When you factor-in what it would cost to buy a dual-port eSata
interface then it means that you're getting the standalone 500
GB SATA drive for about what 'internal' drives are selling for.

I believe that I read a review in which it was stated that some
accompanying 'backup' software did not work correctly but as I
am only interested in the 'hardware' that is not an issue with
me.

The first one of these Seagate packages got me both an eSata
interface card (for my 'old' PC) as well as an external drive.
Now I've bought a second one to equip my 'new' PC with an
external eSata interface and it provides me with another drive
for more storage space.