This is the highest capacity external hard drive in Seagate’s range. Although you can get enclosures that use multiple drives in RAID for greater capacity, the Seagate 750GB represents the size ceiling for single-drive units, at least for the time being.

The drive comes configured as a single FAT32 partition out of the box, which means that there should be no problems using it under both Mac and PC. The manual advises against this though, encouraging you to pick your allegiance from the outset and format under Mac. The drive itself comes empty, the bundled backup software contained on the included CD.

Other than the manual and disc, the box contains both a USB cable and a 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable. The drive lacks eSATA and FireWire 800 connectivity, but it doesn’t really need them.

It may have an advertised raw capacity of 750GB, but out of necessity you lose just over 50GB to formatting, taking you down to 698GB of usable space. The enclosure will stack on top of other units, which is a nice addition.

Given the drive’s monstrous capacity we are a little apprehensive about its short one-year warranty. Even though the drive itself will stop spinning when it’s been idle for a few minutes, it’s still not bullet proof, and 700GB of data is a lot to lose. Despite this, the Seagate 750GB makes for a good general purpose backup device – just be gentle with it.