Seagate's 750GB Pushbutton Back-up Hard Drive
By Ryan Block 
posted Apr 28th 2006 8:51AM
posted Apr 28th 2006 8:51AM
We'd heard it, it leaked, it got reviewed, then announced, now
it's time to get your 750GB perp drives on people. Seagate's new 750GB
Pushbutton Back-up Hard Drive isn't by an means out of the ordinary -- it's an external drive with USB 2.0 and FireWire,
the only difference is it's 750GB in a single drive, not two drive in RAID 0. For what you're getting the $559 doesn't even really seem
that out of control, and you'll have your chance to get one starting next month, according to Seagate. We're not going
to ask what the hell kind of data you've got that requires you to go buy a 750GB drive (or a couple of 'em for an
array, as it were), but copious storage early adopters, we tip our hats to you.
Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disc drives, providing products for a wide-range of Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, and Consumer Electronics applications.
I love this brand!
The thing is... USB! FireWire!
This should ship with gigabit ethernet.
I have 400Gb of data, that I would want to backup on a device like this... but can you imagine the restore time over USB? Insane. It's useless without a speedy way to recover from it, which means gigabit.
DavidK, um... USB 2.0 is as fast as Firewire. How would GigE help you restore faster if you're restoring to a drive that's attached using IDE, USB or Firewire?
Actually, USB really isn't quite as fast as Firewire. USB is burst transfer, not sustained like Firewire so USB get around 52MB/sec max, and less most of the time, while Firewire get 50MB/sec sustained. Firewire 800 would be more ideal, getting 100MB/sec sustained.
"We're not going to ask what the hell kind of data you've got that requires you to go buy a 750GB drive"-
Well, that is not the case any more. Really, 750 GB is not too high to many people like me these days. Those of us who are all the time with PC and net, even 1000 GB is not too much.
750GB? Boy, I wish I knew how to fill it.
Wait. Music, video, tons of programs, stuff I relaly don't need.
Yep, there we go.
Really, 750 GB is not too high to many people like me these days.
Exactly. Backing up, plus music, plus RAW files, etc. Brings the per-gig cost down to 75c, too.
It needs a sata connection - and yes, a GigE would be a nice addition as well so it can be used as a san.
I'll tell you how. Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II. That's 16.7 megapixels. A 16 bit TIF is 96 megs! I remember when 100 meg drives cost $599!
Shoot, I remember when my newspaper bought a Sun 1 gig hard drive for our pagination system that was bigger than a washing machine, had a data cable that was two inches in diameter and cost $10,000!
I'll take two of these babies and put them in a SeriTek serial ATA dual enclosure with RAID 1 and wonder how soon I'll fill them up. Way faster than USB or Firewire. Only gigabit ethernet on a good day could beat it.
I'm in for one. Too much video work, not enough space. Not just hd space, but literal space. The fewer of these things I have to get, the better.
insert obligatory "now i can back up all of my pr0n" reference here.
750 GB is too much? No... I have at the moment 1Tb in my main PC and about 3Tb total over my personal home network. More than 70% of space is already used :)))
I hope they drop just the raw drive as well. Then I can get 2 for a stripped RAID setup via SATA enclosure. As a photographer and digital tech, 750gb is about 4-6 months for me. So I'm glad to see it. But really USB and FW400 is useless for me. I would however, jump at a NAS w/gigabit.
by the way, newegg has the internal 750 gb drives in stock. Just a heads up. :)
-Taylor
A backup solution is worthless without mirroring or a nice RAID setup. I've had at least 3 external firewire drives from different manufactures, including Seagate that just up and died on me over the last couple of years. One of them had the source files for my brother-in-laws wedding video that I shot.
I bought a 1tb ReadyNas instead so when one of the drives dies, I just swap it out and don't loose data
Yeah, I don't think I'm going to buy this drive because it's just not big enough. I'm waiting for the 100 Tb drives to come down in price to say, 50 credits or so. Then I'll stock up. :)
We use these drives (12 of them) in the office for our video editing. Damn fast, even on USB. Not as good as dedicated storage solutions, but perfect for moving around from computer to computer if needed.
I could fill this with fresh Particle Image Velocimetry data in a single day, and our system doesn't even have near the output that newer ones do - there are people that use storage like this for work and research that would love to be able to move things around in a smaller package than RAID drive out there now. Still, this is clearly aimed to the home market - even the case itself looks pretty flimsy (don't know if it is or not, but doesn't look like it would survive a drop too well)
in theory a computer with an external SATA port and a case with a SATA port would provide the best speed for a drive this size. even FW800 would be pretty tedious for something this size.
mmmm... copious!
something worth noting if you work with audio or video...
i've got a 300GB Seagate w/16mb cache in this same housing. it's nice and fast and plenty quiet but it spins down after 15-20 minutes of inactivity - a minor inconvenience, but annoying all the same. this results in the occasional dropped frame or extended pause before playback.