 I love it--You cannot have mine! |
| Review Date: February 3, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Dusty White, Currently working on a new book somewhere |
Windows crashed--hard. Twice (in two weeks). I lost everything. Sure, I had "some" backups, but I lost a lot of software I have had so long I had tossed, or lost, the installation CDs.
This thing updates twice a week, and I never notice it. The only way I know it is there is by its pretty blue glow. The is one of the most important investments I have ever made, and I wish i were smart enough to have purchased it years ago. 1TB fits everything. I never (ever) have to worry about space again, and now that it is paid for, I never have to worry about buying it again. My whole computer fins on this thing--everything, including the operating system. If Windows does crash again, I can just copy from my Seagate and an hour later I am "like new." No down time--no loss of critical files I will never get back.
Look, I don't know, or care, about some computer voodoo that some people think this thing should have. To me it is a massive hard drive that you store your stuff on. It even has a "one-click backup" thing. That's it. End of story. It'snot a computer. It's not a phone, or a camera, or an iPod. All it needs to do is to make sure that YOUR STUFF is safe if your computer crashes (and it has a lot of extra space in case you want to store video or documents or whatnot on. It does that for me just fine. |
Drive is not reliable and poor technical support
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| Review Date: February 18, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Elmer H, NJ |
| I wrote on February 18 about Seagate BlackArmor WS110 External Drive and gave the product a high rating. I was totally wrong. After I used the drive for about two month, it failed. The drive could not be detected by my computer intermittently. I called Seagate and was told to download a new version of software. After I reload the software, the drive still had the same problem. I called Seagate technical support and was told the free phone support period has been expired and I have to pay a fee for any question. Since the drive appeared to have hardware problem, I tried to return the unit using Seagate internet service. The internet suggested me to run the software, called SeaTools to test my drive before the return. The software will determine if the drive qualifies as a failed product. But, when I run the software, I found it did not want to run on my computer. I called Seagate and again I was asked to pay first before their would answer any question. I don't mind to pay a fee for the support. But in this situation, it is just not right in principle. By the way, I have a pretty standard desktop PC manufactured by Dell using Window XP. At this time, I had enough and I gave up. I don't think it is worth any of my time to pursue any further. I have to change the rating from 5 to 1 |
Beware - Not for Servers !
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| Review Date: December 14, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Robert C. Desmarais, |
I recently bought a seagate BlackArmor back up and tried to back up my server with it, unfortunately it will only back up work stations.
I read the box and the documentation and no where was this information were to be found. Seagate should make this information available.
Great unit though...... |
Great Back-up Disk
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| Review Date: May 17, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Richard L. Marshall, Las Vegas, NV |
| Great back-up disk that could not be easier to setup and get started backing up. Transparent. I have not had not use the services as or yet but it looks as if it is doing what it does best. |
Great little back-up unit and Amazon delivered in less than 48 hours after placement of the order!
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| Review Date: September 6, 2009 |
| Reviewer: W. Riter, Huntington, WV |
The Seagate BlackArmor WS 110 has already completely backed up my system and restored it to the exact way it was last saved. Restored six partitions on three hard drives and the only problem was their back-up boot-disk (which they included the means to make from their software) -- it did not allow use of a mouse to go through the selection screens and required use of the tab, space-bar, arrow keys and enter, but I managed to work my way through.
It is quiet, gets slightly warm after eight hours and is a little slow, but I'll trade that for an exact duplicate of my system without having to use any discs, re-enter the operating system, data or programs.
Should have waited a week for the price to go down. Good product, great service from Amazon.
Bill Riter |
A Well Done Backup Solution
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| Review Date: March 16, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Boogaloo, |
If you are looking for a comprehensive SYSTEM file image and data file backup system for multiple computers, then you will want to research Seagate's 'NAS' version of the BlackArmor drive system specifically meant to service networked computers in capacities from 1TB up to the Library of Congress. Download Seagate's BlackArmor manual for more details. Beware that it lumps NAS and DAS types together and fully fails to explain the difference up front.
The WS-110 BlackArmor drive is Seagate's 1-TB "DAS" backup/storage drive, where the backup software system is meant for the drive's 'host' computer, only, via USB (cable included) OR eSATA (cable NOT included). Seagate recommends USB for reasons unknown. I have not tried eSATA largely because I've found the USB connect to be impressively fast for this home user's basic data and SYSTEM file backup and storage needs when the total transfer is 1-GB or less. Under a Windows 7 Intel i3 laptop, it really is quite speedy.
You CAN use this drive as additional external storage among all your networked computers. Partition the drive or simply create dedicated folders. The latter is simpler (therefore better in my view). Either method allows 'drive mapping' each computer to a dedicated storage area. By drive mapping, which is simple to do, you will get a directly accessible link under "(MY) Computer" that looks and acts like a dedicated disc drive and avoids the need to constantly open up 'Network Connections' to find it. It also works best with Windows on-going, highly annoying inability to keep shared sources connected.
The BlackArmor software is capable and meets my complete needs. It first offers to create a full SYSTEM image for crash restoration, allows for scheduling incremental or full backups to keep it up to date, and also allows for scheduling multiple data file backups (full or incremental) and each can have its own schedule and frequency. This gives you the option of tailoring backup routines where critical data can be backed up more frequently than less critical folders. 'Incremental' is the default method and the BlackArmor software can do a full restore from an incremental backup set; it just takes a little longer since it also has to consolidate the series down at the same time.
Bringing XP, VISTA and WIN 7 systems together into a networked backup routine can make one old and grey, quickly. XP doesn't offer much of any backup routine, VISTA Home Premium at least allows for creating data file backups over a network, and WIN 7 Home Premium adds the ability to create updated SYSTEM image backups, but requires the PRO version to do it over a network. Are you annoyed, yet? You will want to study your need very carefully as you consider the WS-110 DAS type drive versus one of Seagate's NAS type drives for a home networked system. NAS solves what Microsoft has never been willing to do. For a single computer, DAS is the obvious choice.
There is one other utility that helps automating an XP data backup over a network. Microsoft offers "SyncToy" in a free download that can be scheduled to automatically run on an XP machine using Windows Task Manager scheduling system. As usual, Windows 'Help' system does a poor job of precisely explaining how to set it up, but it offers enough promise that you may find the learning curve worthwhile. |
Great drive, lousy software
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| Review Date: January 26, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Douglas A. Lathrop, |
Had to buy an esata cable, not included. However Windows 7 64 recognized it immediately with the esata connection. It is pre-formatted for NTFS. Super speed with esata.
However the Black Armor software that comes on the drive proved useless. First it would not recognize the drive with esata. Needs a software patch which is NOT supplied on their website. You have to email Seagate tech support and wait for a link and password to be sent back. Funny that Win 7 can read the drive with no software added but Seagate's own software requires a patch. However even though the patch allowed the Black Armor software to see the drive, it still would not do a backup to it. When I tried the One-Click method that they tout the software told me there was no space on the drive for the image, which is ridiculous since there was over 900 GB free. After looking at their poor excuse for help screens I decided that it wanted me to create a partition just for Back Armor images. After creating the "special" partition, it still told me that it could find no free space. I then tried just doing a regular image backup and it wanted a destination for it. I hit the browse button and got a strange screen that allowed no navigation anywhere.
At this point I had had enough and uninstalled the Black Armor program. I had to use Windows Disk Management to get rid of the "special" partition and expand the drive back to one large one like I prefer. I then simply used Win 7's backup capability to create my backup image on the drive.
In conclusion, the drive itself is great with a 5 year warranty to protect it. However I would skip the included software, at least if you want to take advantage of esata (and if you don't care about esata why spend the extra bucks to get this model?) |
Works fine.
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| Review Date: April 14, 2010 |
| Reviewer: PJW, |
| I am not a computer person. I could not make the software work properly. So I took it to my computer person and he deleted all the software by formatting the drive. Now it works just fine. My compter recognizes it as drive E. So when I want to save I just save it in E. It has a large capacity and so I will never fill it up. The software is just a bunch of fuss. Who needs it? Just save your data on this hard drive and you will always have it. |
Disk Seems Solid But Software Needs Polish
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| Review Date: December 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer: G. Jones, Sacramento, California |
I've had the drive about three weeks. I bought it to facilitate installation of Windows 7 and to fill out the storage capacity on my machine. The drive itself seems to be pretty solid but I have some issues with the Black Armor backup software: 1) Setting up a scheduled backup is a little tricky and it took me a few tries to get it right. The "One Click Backup" option is available but it wasn't obvious to me that this was what you want at first. 2) Now that the scheduled backup runs the program doesn't seem to update the cute little calendar until you start the program again. 3) The Log reports that the backup completed "successfully" but also indicates an error code for which I have yet to find any documentation. So I'm left thinking maybe it did OK maybe it didn't. 4) There was a conflict with my scheduled run of Defrag locking the disk when backup wanted access. Once again there was no help on this one, just a log entry that the run didn't complete successfully.
Overall I'm not sure whether the software is worth the trouble. I may just give up and use the Windows Backup, my needs are simple: just keep a disk image for me so if the internal disk goes south I can get up and running without too much disruption.
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Doesn't encrypt anything if uses as USB drive.
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| Review Date: October 16, 2009 |
| Reviewer: NJV, LA, CA USA |
I bought this thing to safely archive business record away but don't want to use any software because it may not work 5 years from now. Bad news, this drive will only encrypt what you backup using the supplied software and encrypt nothing if you just copy files directly to the drive.
This is an abuse of the BlackArmor name for the line of product. The older models do encrypt everything. |
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