Seagate 400GB Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive

Reviews: Storage

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
Seagate
Jun. 7, 2005

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Taking a Closer Look

Seagate did a good job of packing the 400GB Pushbutton Backup external hard drive. They didn't just put it in a static bag and throw it in the box, they vacuum sealed it. I'm not sure if the vacuum sealing offers any advantages, but it sure looks cool and for some reason impressed me. Although I should say, while I was looking at it I couldn't stop thinking about freeze dried ice cream!

Once out of the bag we can see that this drive is rather large (7.125" D x 5.2" W x 7" H). It's roughly square, made out of plastic and has a large rubber ring on one side so that you can stack two units or just lay it flat on your desk. The stacking option is nice although I couldn't imagine have two of these things; 400GB is way more than I need, 800 would just be silly. I chose to mount it upright using the included stand that snaps onto the bottom.

On the backside of the drive we see all of the various connectors. This is the dual-option variety so it has both USB and Firewire connectors. In addition to the obvious extra connection options, this also allows for sharing files between PC's and Mac's.

Seagate of course included a power supply for the Pushbutton drive as well as cables for either connection type. There is a quick start guide and a CD with the bundled Bounceback Express backup software and drivers for the drive should you need them.

Software

Seagate chose to bundle Bounceback Express with this external hard drive and unfortunately it provides backing to the "you get what you pay for' phrase. The "Express' part of the name implies that this is not full featured and indeed, you cannot perform any kind of system recovery in case of disaster, this is merely to store files. The backup software pretty much performs a copy for you to your external hard drive and that's about it. You can setup your own jobs to backup specific directories or apply filters to a job, for example excluding .tmp files.

After installing Bounceback Express the first thing it wants to do is scan your hard drive so it knows what to backup. This is a rather time consuming process and you are expected to just sit there and wait. I wouldn't be bothered by it all except that it isn't really doing anything; no files are being copied it's just scanning. It seems to me that it could just start copying what's there and save some time. Even worse is when you wish to perform a differential backup, which is a really great feature but poorly executed; again the software must scan your hard drive for changes but this time it must actually verify the files against some other information to see what has changed. For my system with about 87GB of hard drive spaced used, I waited 12 minutes before it told me that 451 files had changed. Perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but that really bothered me.

My suggestion with this software would be to use it for specific directories and kill the complete system backup. You can't perform any disaster recovery and will have to reinstall Windows anyway in the event of serious failure. The differential scan should also run much more quickly on a smaller set of files.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Taking a Closer Look & Software
Page 3: Testing
Page 4: Conclusion

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by CTM420 on June 7, 2005 - 5:59 pm

This is the stuff that makes an audio engineer giddy like a school-girl. Oh man, gotta love firewire.

2 - Posted by Guest on August 3, 2005 - 9:46 am

I will assume you were paid well to provide a good review for a drive that is well known for being DOA or that works once and never again. Did you actually use the drive or just look at it? You should edit your review and apologize to anyone who bought one based on your review. I guess it is possible Seagate would send a fixed sample, one that actually works that is, to you.

The first time I used the drive it took several tries for the system to see it. I got errors and it kept powering off. I reformatted it and it was fine after that and I was able to back up my drive.
The second time I used the drive it just started clicking, then it went clank, and then it was dead. End of story, just like that. Now it's on it's way back to Seagate for replacement. I guess I am lucky I found out during a routine backup and not when I needed the data on the drive. I hope the replacement has the problem fixed, but from the reviews at Amazon, I am not going to get my hopes up.
I wish I would have read the reviews on Amazon.com before I bought that drive. Most seem very familiar to the fate of my drive. You should read those reviews, over 90% describe the same problems.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/...
ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/102-7785672-1312160?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=electronics

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