I was just thinking about getting one of these so any opinions would be great.
I’ve had mine up and running for about a week now.
My first impressions were good and still sort of are?
Let me explain…
The unit itself is well built and I personally don't have a problem with its appearance – plus it’s behind my monitor, so it’s completely out of sight
It installed fine out of the box (XP), I didn’t need to use the supplied eSATA card because my mobo had an eSATA interface already, so there were no problems there. I haven’t bothered with the software.
Moving on, the first thing that slightly actually annoyed me was the fact that it came formatted as fat32? I didn’t think anyone used this file system anymore? I would have just preferred it if it had been sent unformatted – I'm being fussy I know.
Anyway, I began to format it as ntfs and that's when I noticed it making a steady clicking noise, which was distinctively audible above the ambient noise of my near silent system. I let it finish and then I made my first system backup; no problems here, but I did notice the clicking again. I've concluded that I just have a noisy drive and I don't know whether I should rma it or not? It's not really any noisier than my laptops drive with Vista, but compared to my internal drives, you can really hear it.
Also I've noticed that my mouse freezes at the point of starting the drive up? It lasts for a good 10 seconds? Is this normal for eSATA?
It's also worth pointing out that this drive isn't covered by Seagate's usual 5 year warranty, only a year is included.
In conclusion, the drive does everything it's supposed to, it was cheap and it's a bit faster compared to usb. I think that’s everything?
Hope this helps.
SW.
