The Seagate eSATA drive's appearance

The official name of Seagate's drive is ST3500601XS-RK, which is a little bit cryptic, though no more so than any of Seagate's other offerings. Essentially, the unit is an attractive case that contains a Seagate Barracuda ST3500641 7,200 RPM hard disk, a 7200.9 series drive with 500 GB of storage and 16 MB cache. Attached to the case is a SATA cable for connectivity, and an AC adapter cable for power. It is worth mentioning that while we tested the 500 GB drive, Seagate also manufactures a 300 GB version of the eSATA external drive.

The eSATA's design appears similar to the other external solutions from Seagate. The unit's appearance is stylish, brushed silver in appearance with black accents. The power button illuminates a nice blue when powered up, a color scheme that happens to go very nicely with my PC case, though your mileage may vary. The drive is also designed to stack with other Seagate external drives, which is nice. Putting two of these units together in a RAID configuration might be an attractive option for some users.

The box included Promise's eSATA300 TX2 card for PCI.

The unit includes the Promise eSATA300 TX2, an eSATA card that offers two external ports for eSATA devices. This is pretty handy when you consider that only new motherboards have integrated eSATA ports. More on this later.

In addition to the drive and eSATA card, the package contains BounceBack Express V 7.0 software. It's easy enough to use and enables the requisite backup tasks, like backing up entire disks and folders. In addition, Bounceback offers options to schedule backup sets.