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Five of the drives made our chart: Hammer Storage's $330 Desk Hammer (400GB), Iomega's $380 Desktop Hard Drive Triple Interface Platinum Series (400GB), Maxtor's $260 OneTouch II (300GB), Seagate's $330 Pushbutton Backup (400GB), and Western Digital's $280 Dual-option Media Center (320GB).

Of the chart-making drives, only the Iomega model lacked a convenient, front-mounted button for initiating a backup (Western Digital's drive has two buttons). Seagate's model is one of the most attractive of the lot, as well as one of the most versatile. You can orient the drive either horizontally or vertically, and the design lets you lock more than one in a secure stack (in the horizontal position). Western Digital's Media Center has a gracefully sculpted surface, which is raised on one end to accommodate its integrated eight-in-one media card reader; the unit also incorporates a two-port USB hub (one port is handily located up front).

The Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital drives also offer FireWire 400 ports. The Iomega supports both FireWire 400 and the newer FireWire 800, which increases the maximum throughput rating from 400 to 800 megabits per second.

Hammer Storage's Desk Hammer beat the rest of the single-drive pack in our copy files and folders test, taking 34 percent less time than the average of the other four drives. Even so, just 93 seconds separated the Hammer Storage drive from the last-place model (Western Digital's Media Center). One factor contributing to the Hammer's fine relative performance is that it's the only drive of the group preformatted to use the NTFS file system, which is more efficient than FAT32. Most external drives ship preformatted to use FAT32 because it works out of the box with more operating systems (NTFS works with Windows NT, 2000, and XP, not older operating systems).

Software Subtleties

The differences in the drives' performance became more evident when we did a full backup, using the backup software that comes with each drive. Here, the Iomega drive led the pack, completing our full backup in an impressively quick 9.5 minutes. Seagate's drive finished last, completing the task in about 23 minutes.

All of the drives shipped with backup software utilities, which varied in capabilities and ease of use. We most liked EMC Dantz's Retrospect Express Backup 6.5, which shipped with the Hammer and Western Digital drives. This version has a slew of features, including the ability to set up different backup routines, as well as the flexibility to change compression and verification settings.

We least liked the simplified Retrospect variant, called Retrospect Express HD, that came with Maxtor's OneTouch II. The app doesn't allow scheduling of multiple backups, and you can't turn off compression and verification settings.

Iomega's drive includes the full version of its own excellent Automatic Backup Professional 3.2, but Seagate ships only a limited version of CMS's BounceBack Express 6 utility with its drive.

Alan Stafford