Backing up has always been one of those abominable yet necessary undertaking that makes keep an eye on blusher dry seem interesting . This may all change next year when Apple release its dazzling Time Machine accompaniment utility . But even then , you ’ll likely still need ample room on a separate driving for lay in your data . Although it wo n’t make backing up any less dull , the Seagate Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive 750 GB offers a hefty amount of store in a small desktop package . However , its sluggish performance will have you waiting a bit longer for your backup to be make out .
The Seagate drive is put up in a fluent and pitch-dark charge card case about the size of a Mac miniskirt . It is project to be stackable with other Seagate effort when lying flat , or it can be operate in a erect orientation using the included pedestal . Both USB and FireWire cables are over 6 feet long , which is convenient . A gamey indicator on the front of the unit service as both the power button and a means of trigger off an prompt backup using the bundled CMS BounceBack Express 6.0 backup utility . ( calculate on when you purchase the drive , it will come bundled with either translation 6 or 7 of BounceBack Express for PowerPC . If you read the software system you could , at no surplus heraldic bearing , download the Universal adaptation 7.1.1 . Seagate user can also tap a special data link in their BounceBack Express software and advance to the Universal BounceBack Professional 7 for $ 39 . )
Operation could n’t be easier . Setup want plugging in the drive ’s external power adaptor and cabling it to your Mac using either a single USB 2.0 port or two FireWire 400 port wine . Once powered on and mount on the Mac desktop , you must reformat the drive using the Apple Disk Utility , as it come PC initialize by nonpayment . The movement is normally asleep , but is still jolly quiet after spin out up .
Considering the specs of this ride ( 7200 rev and 16 MB of onboard cache ) , it should be faster . While not the slowest compared to other drives we ’ve recently tested , the Seagate ’s numbers target it forthright in the third rank of performer , about the same as the slowest drive , the Rocsecure Rocbit 3B ( ) in our Photoshop low - retentiveness mental test , and only 28 percentage quicker than the slow drive , the Maxtor OneTouch II 300 Great Britain ( ) in the matching test .
timed trials
Scale = minute : Seconds
How We Tested : We black market all run with the FireWire drive connected to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 installed and 512 MB of RAM . We examine the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we use FireWire 400 . ) We copied a leaflet contain 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s hard drive to the external backbreaking drive to quiz the drive ’s write speed . We then duplicated that filing cabinet on the external drive to prove both read and write speed . We also used the drive as a scratch disk when running our low-toned - memory Adobe Photoshop CS Suite test . This test is a circle of four tasks performed on a 150 mebibyte file , with Photoshop ’s remembering set to 50 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
If you suffer from a bloated music or TV library , the Seagate Pushbutton Backup External 750 GB will provide immediate relief . Do n’t expect a speed monster , though : this repel trades transfer rate for storage electrical capacity . While the fashion model we looked at represents the largest capacity in the parentage , other Seagate dual - interface FireWire and USB role model are also available in capacities of between 200 GB and 500 GB . USB - only models are available in capacities of between 250 GB and 650 GiB .
[ Jeffy Milstead is a Macworld Lab alumnus and writer living in San Francisco . ]
