Viva La Hard Drives! The Seagate ST9160821U2-RK 160GB Hard Drive
Hard Drives store your data. This much you know, and in the past, it was all you needed to. But with portability, style, and extra features shifting from the rage to industry standard, Hard drives have gotten a makeover in style, capacity, and even appearance! We’ve got a massive selection of these high-storage beauties, and have scoured up reviews that will help you know your HDD just that much better! Enjoy!
Seagate ST9160821U2-RK
With the proliferation of malware, spyware, and computer viruses ready to do their worst to your system, data backup is more important than ever. But between your huge media files and multitudinous text documents, you’re going to want a device that can handle the load. With the Seagate ST9160821U2-RK External 160GB hard drive, that shouldn’t be a problem. The ST9160821U2-RK is a notebook-class external hard drive with one of the largest capacities of any portable hard drive currently on the market.
It uses perpendicular recording technology to stuff 160GB in a physical space that used to top out at 80 to 100GB. This means that you’ll definitely have the space to backup your entire notebook, or even many of today’s desktops. Alternatively, you can save thousands of MP3s, digital photos, and hours and hours of video from your digital life. The drive also bundles in Mac OS X-compatible software, and features a well-thought-out dual-head USB cable. But such capacity in a portable drive comes at a high price, not to mention more weight.
Perpendicular technology is an important innovation in data storage and, to some extent, turns file backup on its head or, er, side. Think of how you stack books on a shelf. You can fit more books on the shelf if you place them upright side by side rather than lay them flat in a single layer. Likewise, the bits on a perpendicular drive are stacked vertically rather than horizontally as they have been in the past. That method, plus an extra drive head and new platter material, lets Seagate and other manufacturers squeeze more data onto drives of the same size.
The Seagate drive comes in a protective metal case with cooling vents milled in its side. At 0.75 pound, it’s a little heavier than other drives in its class, which usually top out at half a pound. The ST9160821U2-RK comes with a good dual-headed USB cable, with each plug able to reach either end of a large notebook, like the Apple PowerBook G4 15-inch and Toshiba’s Satellite R25-S3509 convertible tablet PC. This is important, since some notebooks (and desktops) have low-powered USB ports: If there isn’t enough juice to power the drive, it’s unusable. (Some USB ports put out enough juice to power everything, but some put out only enough to power flash drives and peripherals like mice and keyboards.) Thankfully, many new notebooks have high-powered USB ports, but it’s still imperative to have the option of being able to use two USB ports to power the hard drive if you use older PCs.
The Seagate drive comes with CMS Products’ BounceBack Express backup software for both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, one of the few drives to do so. Still, I’d rather see CMS Products’ BounceBack Pro packed in rather than offered as an option, especially since the drive is a relatively pricey one. BB Pro is desirable because it allows bootability (the disk is basically cloned), version control, and backup with compare (which can help speed backups).
Between the cross-platform capabilities, the best-of-class capacity, and the intelligent cable design, the Seagate 160GB portable drive truly earns the Editors’ Choice. Yes, it’s expensive, but it has a good dollar-to-gigabyte ratio. If you need to back up a lot of data from a desktop or a notebook, and if you need that data to go, this is the drive to buy!
Related Links: Seagate External Hard Drives
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