My New Seagate External Hard Drive

The external hard drive that I ordered from Buy.com on Sunday arrived yesterday. On Monday I had ordered an i1394 6-4 pin cable from Amazon.com. Amazon.com decided to punish me for choosing the free shipping option by estimating that the order would arrive on June 15. On Tuesday I canceled my Amazon.com order. I then tried to order just the cable and pay shipping. The cable was no longer available. I then went back to Buy.com and ordered the cable. I had to pay $5.63 shipping charge, but they delivered the cable today so I felt the shipping charge was justified.

 

I read the Seagate manual carefully and followed the directions to mount the drive. My computer was rather slow to recognize the drive, but eventually it beeped and I saw that my computer now had a G: drive when I looked at My Computer in Windows Explorer. I then installed the BounceBack software that came with the drive. All went smoothly. I had to designate the source and destination drives for the backup. As soon as the installation was complete, the option to perform a backup came up. I chose to go ahead and do the complete backup of my computer's hard drive. It took an hour and 37 minutes to do the complete backup. Subsequent backups will be much shorter because just changed or new files will be copied to the external drive.

 

The next backup will test the pushbutton feature. When I push a button on the hard drive, the backup is supposed to be launched and performed. I now think it is going to work. I think this is a very clever device.

 

After the backup was complete, I again launched Windows Explorer and examined the files that had been copied to the G: drive. It was good to see all my photos and scanned documents. I just purchased a little peace of mind.

 

The Seagate manual cautioned to properly dismount the drive before detaching the drive from the computer. I clicked on the safely remove hardware icon in the system tray and chose the i1394 device. It came back and said the device could not be removed and to try again later. I tried again, and this time it said it was safe to disconnect. I think the drive was still spinning the first time I tried.