Performance

The unit itself houses anything but a mediocre drive. Inside is Seagate's very own ST3320620AS Barracuda® 7200.10 320GB drive, featuring perpendicular recording, SATA 3Gb/s interface support and a 16MB cache buffer. Sadly, the performance potential of this very nice Barracuda® 7200.10 series drive is a bit overkill when saddled to a USB 2.0 interface. We suspect it was just plain economics to use the same drives in the Desktop series as the Pro series. The Pro series is the only one that supports eSATA, and thusly the only series that can really extract the built in performance of this very good drive. Though *we* have systems with built in eSATA in house, they are still quite rare among the rest of the world.

We've spent a few days with the drive, using it for moving files around the LAN as well as on and off specific machines running XP SP2 and Vista x64. Performance-wise it's quite similar to the Western Digital Mybook 320GB we compared it to, with the Mybook having an ever so slight edge in our impromptu tests using HDTune. The differences were admittedly slight however and not noticable without benchmarks. Such devices are just clearly I/O bound by their SATA/USB bridges, so performance differences will be minor to nonexistent without benchmarking.

Overall our experience with the unit has been a good one. The price was the main attraction we have to admit, as the unit was only $99 after a $70 instant rebate at OfficeMax. Being a Seagate product and having a five year warranty are also feathers in its cap in our opinion as well. Time to wrap things up.