My first hard disk, a good few years ago, had a capacity of 20MB. This was considered more than enough at the time. Since those nave early days the playing field has changed and the goal posts moved. Taking up space on my work area is a 400GB (that's the equivalent of 20,000 of my original unit) external hard drive with the capacity to store a choice of 100 two-hour DVDs; 400 hours of VHS quality video; 64 hours of music; 100,000 digital photos; or nearly 600 games..

This piece of kit, measuring 18.1 x 16.5 x 5.7 cm (D x W x H), from Seagate is designed to stand upright, although it could just as easily be used in a horizontal position, and looks like a slim-line toaster but without the opening for the bread. Unlike the Seagate 100GB Portable External Hard Drive (see www.gadgetspeak.com/gadget/article.rhtm/754/250581/article.html), this drive requires its own mains power supply. Both two and three-pin leads are provided. While on the subject of leads, you also get USB 2.0 and Firewire leads.

See also: Storage

more

All the various connection sockets are located at the rear of the device along with a power on/off switch. Decorating the front of the drive are power and disk activity lights plus a button for activating a backup using the supplied BounceBack Express Software.

According to the User Guide, you should be able to attach this device via either Firewire or USB prior to switching on the computer and have it automatically recognised by your system. However this approach does not always work. On one system it caused a lock-up and the drive needed to be removed so that the system could boot up. When the drive was reattached, it was recognised and appeared in My Computer. This problem did not occur when switching to a second machine.

As mentioned earlier, this drive comes with BounceBack Express software for handling backup tasks. This software, once installed, can be activated from the standard Start menu option or by pressing the button on the front of the drive. BounceBack will offer to carry out a backup immediately its installation procedure has been completed.

On the first machine, it stated that the backup process, involving 12.5GB of data, would take approximately 40 minutes. Great I though, just enough time for a cup of coffee and a chance to glance through the daily newspaper. You can image my disappointment when this process took 6 hours and 27 minutes to be completed at an average speed of 33MB/minute. A second attempt produced similar figures. This is hardly what I would expect from a product with Express in its title.

Using the same machine I then copied 775MB of data made up of 217 files from 26 folders. This took 62 seconds. I am at a loss to explain the discrepancy between the results. Apart from the different amounts of data involved, the only other difference was that BounceBack Express was involved in the first procedure. The difference between the estimated and actual time was so great that I feel that there could have been a conflict between BounceBack Express and some other software running on the system but I have no real evidence to support this theory apart from the results of a second text.

Switching to another machine, I ran the BounceBack Express software. This time the backup involved 8.5GB of data spread over two partitions. The program estimated that the process should take 27 minutes. In fact it took 26 minutes 54 seconds with an average data rate transfer of 181MB/sec. This is more or less what I would have expected to achieve.

While I could not describe this Seagate drive as silent, it is extremely quiet in operation. What slight noise it does make, when in use, is hardly likely to cause any distraction. I certainly have no complaints regarding this aspect of the drive. Expect to pay in the region of £180 for this drive.

http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/external/usbfirewire