CMS Products V2 ABSplus 1TB

Included on most recent PCs, e-SATA is considerably faster than USB 2.0 (which the ABS also supports). Thus, when attached to the e-SATA port, the ABS 1TB took just 25 minutes to back up almost 50GB of data; over USB, it took about 50 minutes to back up the same data.

Despite its speed, though, the overriding impression I'll take away from the CMS V2 ABSplus 1TB is the shock I felt as the included BounceBack Ultimate software partitioned the hard drive I pointed it to without posing any secondary 'Are you sure?' query to confirm my intentions. The software didn't positively identify the ABSplus drive, as there was another 1TB external drive on the system, but it did show the drive letters used by both drives. The occasional lack of confirmation dialog boxes made me nervous, but BounceBack Ultimate is certainly packed with features and versatility. Despite being somewhat gaudy, the new interface is easy to navigate; and the software-hardware combo performed well overall. You can set backups to begin at first connection of the drive to the PC (USB only; e-SATA isn't plug-and-play on most PCs), and you can define backups sets, schedule backups, and back up to multiple locations.