Review on Seagate ST3500601XSRK 500 GB eSATA External Hard Drive - High Performance and Retail Ready by Anthony Colton

I've been using this disc for about a month now. For the most part I am very happy with them. It's a true eSATA drive and runs about twice as fast on my system as other external USB2 and Firewire drives I have connected to my main computers. As expected, it also seems to be noticeably faster than all of my external SCSIs, but didn't really measure the throughput of those drives. It comes with a Promise eSATA controller that mounts on the PCI bus. The Promise card seems to have reliable drivers as they installed and stayed stable on my XPP/2 system with no problems or conflicts. Two things prevent me from giving this CD five stars. controllable, unstable and prone to accidents. While this doesn't affect the drive (I have several other backup software), it is still sold as part of a bundle and should be considered if you don't have alternative software. I would give the attached backup. The software has NO stars because it crashes so often that it becomes unusable. This has also been noted in reviews on other sites, so it's not something unique to my system. Why such poorly performing software is included is unclear. Another downside is the power button. The power switch automatically resets to the default OFF position when AC power is removed from the drive. This switch must then be pressed (and held for a few seconds) when attempting to turn the drive back on, and will only be successful after the computer has reached a (still unclear) starting point. This may seem insignificant. However, I have two computers that I use as one and are controlled by a KVM switch. In between there are 10 external hard drives connected in different ways (video, photo). If I had to reboot each of these drives at system startup, it would take a very long time for the drives to spin up. The remaining nine light up when power is restored, this one doesn't: it just sits cold, dead, unnoticed. I've never seen such an unnecessary "feature" before. I almost always forget to turn on the drive until I need it as it's only used for ongoing video/image backups. By then when I put in the USB stick the drive letter assignment has changed (seems like XPP can't actually reserve the letter I assign to the eSATA drive when a new key is inserted) so one has to go and change the drive letter assignment to make my batch files work. Frustrating and unnecessary work stoppage! The power button should just stay where the user leaves it. It annoys me almost enough to give the disc THREE stars, but it's better than that. A lame power button and the DOA software package prevent this drive from being guaranteed 5 stars; but it's fast and big enough to even be used for video editing.