Seagate's BlackArmor PS-110 500GB USB drive grabs our Attention and holds it

There are some things that you buy that just have to work. You do not care for excuses with these products, only about if and how well they perform. One of these products is external disk drives. You buy them, plug them in, and poof they should just work. It is because of this that they are perfect for our Short Attention Span review. After all if you spend more than 30 minutes trying to get one of these working then we are pretty sure that a trip back to where you bought it from is going to be in order.

Today we are letting our attention wander over the Seagate BlackArmor PS-110. This is a USB 2.0 500GB drive that is aimed at the mobile computer who needs excellent data protection in addition to external storage. Let’s see if the PS-110 can bet out 30 minute clock.

Packaging
Ah what’s in a box? Well honestly everything. The box a package comes in can often make the difference between getting purchased and getting put back on the shelf. In the case of the BlackArmor PS-110 Seagate has put enough information on the box to get you interested and more than likely get you to put the PS-110 into your basket.

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Once you do get the PS-110 home you will find that Seagate has not skimped on the goodies inside either. They give you a great [and surprisingly informative] quick start guide and a single, short USB 2.0 cable. This last item is a great improvement; many smaller USB drives require multiple USB plugs to provide power and for data and reduce the number of USB ports available on our laptops and netbooks. With the PS-110 this is happily not the case. 

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The BlackArmor PS-110
Professional Backup on the Go
After you marvel at the packaging for the PS-110 you will want to get the drive out and take it for a spin.
The PS-110 is the same size and dimensions as the FreeAgent |Go drives [Except for the 1TB FreeAgent]. It is matte black in keeping with the BlackArmor name and has only a single blue LED to indicate power to the drive.

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The flavor of PS-110 that we tested here was the 500GB. All of Seagate’s DAS [Direct Attached Storage] drives come with pre-installed software for backing up your data. This software is powered by Acronis; one of the leading names in backup and recovery software. By putting the software directly on the drive Seagate gives you an easier method to get up and running very quickly. One other “feature” that I like is that if you have a FreeAgent | GO drive you can use the features in the Seagate Manager software with the PS-110. This is very handy as it allows you to create an encrypted space to store sensitive files on the PS-110 in addition to its backup capabilities.