X-bit labs

Two External Hard Disk Drives with 400GB and 500GB Storage Capacity (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 03/18/2006 | 10:50 AM ]

Seagate Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive (ST3400801CB-RK)

Seagate’s external drive is designed in the company’s traditional style, too. The case is made of black and gray plastic. You can position the drive upright by means of a special stand. As the name of the model suggests, there is a button here, too, that triggers a data backup procedure. A LED indicator of the drive activity is built into that button. Two FireWire ports, one USB 2.0 port and a power connector are located on the back panel of the drive. There are ventilation slits in the black plastic parts of the case.

The employed hard disk drive has a storage capacity of 400GB and an 8MB buffer. The spindle rotation speed is 7200rpm. The average seek time is 8.5 milliseconds. The device supports FireWire (IEEE1394a) and USB 2.0 interfaces. It can withstand a non-operating shock of 350Gs. The dimensions of the case are 181 x 57 x 165 millimeters; the weight is 1.2kg.

The drive comes with a quick start guide, USB cable, FireWire cable, power adapter with a cord, and CD with data backup software (BounceBack Express).

The retail price of the drive is $380.

Testbed and Methods

We tested the external drives in the following benchmarks:

• WinBench 99 2.0
• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• FC-Test 1.0

The testbed was configured like follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4

The USB 2.0 interface of the drives was tested using one of the mainboard’s ports. A FireWire 400 interface was provided by the mainboard’s onboard VIA VT6307 controller.