Seagate 100 GB External Hard Drive 

Compact and light are the words that best describe this 5400 rpm external drive from Seagate. And yet it can store up to 100 GB of data. One good thing about the drive is that it derives its power from the USB port itself, so you don't need a separate power supply to operate it. However, it still bundles a separate power supply in case your USB port is not self-powered.

We tested the drive on a MSI P4N Diamond motherboard with Intel P4 3.6GHz processor and 1GB RAM. We tested it mainly for the drive's read/write data capabilities since that's what it will be used for mostly, and not for installing and running apps. It took 1 min 45 secs to write 1.3 GB of data onto the hard drive (write speed) and 1min 20 secs to copy from the external hard drive to an internal one (read speed). The data set included a mix of MP3s, movie clips, pictures, Word and Excel files. We also ran a benchmark to test its read/write speeds. The average read speed came out to be 23.5 MB/s, with the maximum and minimum being 26.2 and 15.9 MB/s respectively. The drive's average write speed was 9.7 MB/s with a maximum and minimum of 19.3 MB/s and 4.5 MB/s respectively. 

The drive comes bundled with a back-up software known as Bounce Back Express, which has a user-friendly interface to back up your files. The software allows you to create a bootable drive image, synchronizing with the PC to check for and automatically update the backed-up files. It also lets you access the older versions of the backed-up files.

Bottom Line:

The best thing about the drive is the price at which it comes-that of 13K, that makes it fairly cheap considering its performance, capacity and portability. 

Other portable drives with much lesser capacities such as the 5GB portable drive from Seagate itself cost around Rs 10,000. So 100 GB of capacity and absolute portability is definitely worth the price.

Ankit Kawatra