X-bit labs

Seagate External 200GB Hard Disk Drive Review (page 9)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 12/20/2004 | 12:39 PM ]

Conclusion

Now there is one manufacturer of external hard disk drives more in this world. Seagate’s entrance into this market will surely increase the level of competition and give a reason for the rest of the players to improve their produce and reduce its cost. Seagate’s new drive features a very original design and a universal connectivity thanks to the support of two interfaces. As for the performance factor, our tests reveal some unpleasant things like surprisingly low results in WinBench 99 when FAT32 is in use. This is probably due to incorrect operation of the drive’s controller or firmware with this particular benchmark. For example, we didn’t have the same problem in FC-Test.

Of course, we can’t compare the Seagate drive to its opponents in our tests directly since they have different capacities. Anyway, the Seagate is almost everywhere slower than the Maxtor OneTouch II which has a serious advantage in the form of its 16MB buffer. Still, if we neglect the incomprehensible FAT32 results in WinBench, the Seagate is overall similar to the first-generation OneTouch from Maxtor and is slightly faster than the product from Western Digital. Of course, the prospects of a product in the market are also determined by its pricing, and the price of Seagate’s 200GB external hard disk drive was quite competitive at the time of our writing this review.