Seagate 500GB eSATA External HDD

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It’s fair to say that Seagate has manufactured an incredibly fast external hard drive, with speeds rivalling (and even surpassing) internal hard drive performance here. That is undoubtedly a commendable achievement, but where this device falls down is in its cross-platform flexibility and that isn’t necessarily Seagate’s fault.

eSATA is in its infancy and until its support is widespread, it is up to Seagate to ensure that the drive works on a wide range of platforms; thus making it a big shame not to see a USB 2.0 port on the back of the drive as a fall back for machines that don’t support the eSATA standard. In saying that, it’s a nice touch to see an eSATA controller card included in the box, but unfortunately that only caters for one machine and doesn’t cater for notebooks that don’t support the standard without an additional PCMCIA card.

The drive will set you back just under £170 including VAT, which is around £45 more than an internal 500GB Barracuda 7200.10 drive. However, that’s not the comparison we should be making. There aren’t too many eSATA drives out on the market at the moment, but Iomega’s 500GB eSATA/USB 2.0 drive was one that came to our attention when searching around. It’s available on Dabs for less than the price of Seagate’s drive, too.