Domain Name Com's Electronics Seagate STM903203BAA1E1-RK Maxtor STM903203BAA1E1-RK 320GB Black Armor 2.5-Inch External Hard Drive

Electronics Seagate STM903203BAA1E1-RK Maxtor STM903203BAA1E1-RK 320GB Black Armor 2.5-Inch External Hard Drive

Domain Name Com's - Electronics : Seagate STM903203BAA1E1-RK Maxtor STM903203BAA1E1-RK 320GB Black Armor 2.5-Inch External Hard Drive

- Speed penalty and the dreaded Y-cable... or not
I was in the market for a blackarmor 320gb, or a freeagent go 320gb (new slim version). The encryption isn't a must have but the original reason why I was drawn to this particular drive. I have been researching a little every night for a week. Beyond the two or three relatively thorough reviews on the smaller 160gb drive, I still wanted to know two things:

1. Does the speed difference kill the deal for a BlackArmor 320gb? I could not find an HDtach post on either of these new drives!

2. Do both freeagent go slim and BlackArmor drives come with a Y-cable OR a single cable? (reason why you might care below)

There's not much I can do about HDTach tests, I have to just buy the drive and find out.

Now bear with me on this rant about cables. I have the previous generation freeagent go 160gb and the Y-cable is very annoying to pack for traveling. At 30 inches, it's longer than needed for notebook users and/or travelers. I NEVER find myself working on a tabletop that allowed or required me to place my drive 30 inches away, or even if I wanted to for whatever reason. In this day and age, it's VERY unsightly seeing cables sitting on the desk when they don't need to be. This is why I wanted my next "portable" drive to have a short SINGLE usb port to minimize cables and plugs and overall bulk when traveling. I know, I know, I could easily go out and look for a short usb cable for the drive, but I am lazy. We learn from past mistakes, and one of the things I grew to hate about my FreeAgent Go 160gb was the cable. The other was the stupid (initially cool) wedge shape that makes it a cumbersome task to pick up.

The few reviews of the BlackAmor I found, do not confirm whether this drive comes with short single USB cables or the y-cables designed help deliver more power to the drive. So after a week of failure to learn these key issues on either drive, I decided on the BlackArmor purely for its encryption, ready to deal with a slower drive and another annoying y-cable.

THE DRIVE ARRIVED...
...and I'm very happy to report, the BlackArmor 320gb comes with a short black 17.5" SINGLE PLUG USB cable and not a long gaudy Y-cable of old. This cable was good enough to carry power to the hard drive from both my PC and my VAIO TX notebook. I was worried but glad to find out that this 320gb drive can function from 1 port's power (~500mw?). It's also nice to see that they've learned that these portable drives need a portable cable.

Right after I setup the password, I immediately ran an hdtach test in xp against my old freeagent go 160gb because the BlackArmor isn't worth it to me if it was significantly slower, I was hoping for no more than 15% slower average read speed.

The BlackArmor 320gb benched 32.8MB/s average read, and 22.6ms access time with 7% cpu utilization.

The FreeAgent go 160gb did 31.4MB/s average read, and 16.0ms access time with 8% cpu utilization. *this drive was ~60% full during the test

I know I am comparing two different sized drives. Again since I can't find a bench for the freeagent 320gb (besides one with a very horrible result of 10MB/s) I am doing this comparison for my own sake of judging what speed is acceptable or not.

Anyway, the penalty in access time is heavier than I had hoped, but overall it isn't significant enough to make me regret getting it instead of the new 320gb FreeAgent Go. The read speed is surprisingly fast since the 160gb blackarmor seemed to be benching around 18MB/s. I will be keeping my eye out for more benches for these drive because I'm still curious, but regardless I am happy with this drive.

As a final note, the pouch supplied seals the deal for me. it's made of a thin microfiber suede material and should protect it from basic handling while traveling in your briefcase or computer case. As described by the other reviewer, the pouch has a divider using the same microfiber suede material that lets you put the pouch in there safely without scratching. It's appreciated. Also, I recommend handing the drive by grabbing the drive itself while it's in the pouch and not by the nylon pull string or expect to accidentally drop the drive onto the floor.

I didn't purchase my drive from Amazon because I was fortunate to find a cheap auction, though I would have purchased from Amazon as my next choice. I have read all 6 of the reviews on Amazon when I was deciding on mine and want to thank Amazon's service by posting my own review to help others. I hope my review has helped you decide on or against the drive.

Rating:

- Great HW encryption, Not reliable though...
I bought 2 of these back in Aug 08 from OD on sale for 139. The first one was DOA. The second one was working perfectly, but 10 days of use started to display a 'potential failure imminent, call Seagate for RMA' though it still continued to work just fine. Caution got the best of me and returned after 14 days (max rtn policy at OD), unfortunately they had no more in stock. With this kind of record, I will not buy online, as the rma return and exch would eat me up in shipping costs. I'll wait until it's on sale locally again for another try. Great idea, Mounts as a CD (read only) drive until logged in, then you get another drive letter with the 320gb capacity. Same as the Sandisk cruzers using the U3 technology.

Rating:

- Great companion for Netbooks with small SSD Drives
Let's get right to it...

^-- The Pros --^
- Chunky capacity in a small, easy to carry package
- Comes with a pull-string pouch. The semi non-slip material of the pouch makes it a little tricky to put-in/take-out the drive, but is worth the hassle because you can lay the drive on the pouch while in use and not have to worry too much that the drive will shift around. The pouch is also divided inside, so the included cable can be carried with the drive, but be separated (via the cloth divider) and therefore no scratching the drive
- Comes with a Y-type USB connect/power cable; mini-usb on 1 side, split out to 2 full-size USB on the other. The mini-usb side plugs into the drive, then you plug 1 of the USB full-size to your PC/notebook. If the drive doesn't spin up properly, you'll need to plug in the other USB to your PC/Notebook to supply more power.
- Encryption/Decryption is done via hardware. This means minimal overhead to the read/write speeds of the drive.
- Piece of mind. Along with the security being done via hardware, it's also very well done. Password required when connecting, don't know the password? Then the drive is a paperweight.
- It's fast (in my opinion). When you search for reviews on this item, you're going to see it get panned here and there for being on the lower-end scale in terms of read/write speeds compared to other similar drives on the market. I'm a Tech by occupation and deal with connecting to hundreds/thousands (literally) Servers every day and have to deal with moving data around. My subjective feel of this drive is that it's quite responsive with reading/writing data to/from the machine it's connected to...I've never felt like the Drive was trudging along.
- It's got good looks. This is another thing that gets panned for this drive in reviews, that it's not stylish compared to other drives of its' kind. The case is a mixture of flat black, ultra-glossy black and 2 big blue indicator LEDs. For a Gadget Geek like myself, I think it's got incredible appeal.

^-- The Cons --^
- Standard USB ports supply 5v @ 500mA of power. Unfortunately there are many drives out on the market that require considerably more at initial spin-up, the BlackArmor seems to be one of them. At home and at work, I need both USB connectors to be plugged in to run my BlackArmor. Not so much a problem for me though, I have one of those portable USB chargers (Xantrex Technologies 852-0251 XPower Mobile Mini Power Source) that I plug the BlackArmor into and it powers it just fine and I don't have to waste the extra USB port.
- The sync software it comes with will ONLY sync with drives connected to the PC it's connected to...It won't sync with network connected drives (According to Support, this is by design). That's a bit of a bummer for me, but there's other/better backup and sync software out there.

^-- Other brands to consider --^
- Western Digital My Passport Essential 320GB
- LaCie Little Disk 320GB
- SimpleTech Signature Mini 320GB
- Seagate FreeAgent Go 320GB

^-- Wrap up --^
I bought the BlackArmor as an accessory to go with my Asus EEE 901 netbook. The stock 901 has only 12gb capacity (because it uses SSD (Solid State Disk) drives). With the good looks, perfectly fine read/write speeds and hardware level encryption I believe this drive to be an excellent companion and have no problem recommending it.

Rating:

- Love it!!
This is a great drive, and very easy to use. I purchsed one for my husband almost three months ago, and decided that I just had to have one for myself. Installation was quick and simple. Great tool to have for those who use the computer for everything. I especially love the fact of the encryption and password protection.

Rating:

- Flawless
This drive is great! Easy to setup. Once you plug it in and enter your password it encrypts/decrypts your data in hardware so fast you will never know that it is happening (unless you forget your password.)

It remembers your password until it is unplugged/powered off. Even after rebooting it still remains unlocked which is very convenient if you do a lot of that.

I bought the 320GB version and carry it in my laptop case. It would fit in a shirt pocket and weighs less than my cell phone. The rubberized black is non-slip and the chrome accent looks good. There are two lenses lit by blue LEDS. One lets you know when it has power, the other when it is unlocked which also blinks during data xfer.

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