Everybody needs a lot more digital storage these days, even your grandma. Most people have tons of music, videos, photos, and documents all in digital format. An average person’s digital collection of media would easily fill several rooms if they were in a “physical” format. It’s always handy to have several portable hard drives on you; some people use it for backup, others for transferring files between places, and some use them just because they’ve run out of room elsewhere. I usually find myself in the last scenario, even though I have multiple terabytes on a home network.
It used to be that small flash drives cost several hundreds of dollars. Now you can get 500GB or even a TB portable hard drive for less than $100, and they’re now small enough to take along with you in a laptop bag.
One of the better-known hard drive manufacturers is Seagate, who have been making hard drives for over since 1979. Now Seagate is offering small 2.5″ hard drives in an attractive case called the Seagate FreeAgent Go, and they’re available in capacities of 250GB up to 1TB.
Here’s some of the marketing fluff:
Get a lot without carrying a lot. And look good while you do it.
- Available in a range of capacities, from 250GB to 1TB
- The thinnest portable drive available. Even the cables are compact
- Multiple colors to suit your style and let you tell one FreeAgent Go from the next
Simple backup and sync.
If it’;s not easy, it won’;t happen.
- Automatic backup for peace of mind
- Encryption technology keeps your files safe
- Easy synchronization means you always have the most current version with you
- Fast data transfer with USB
On the next page we take an in-depth look…
The FreeAgent Go is clearly intended for the average home user. Not only does the hard drive come pre-installed with their Seagate manager, but they have also preloaded muvee Reveal 8, which easily allows users to edit their home movies with some nice (if not pre-canned) results. Seagate wants their hard drives to have some sex appeal, too, and so they’ve made the FreeAgent Go available in ten different colors: Gold, green, pink, red, black, silver, blue, light blue, orange, and copper.
The drive itself is pretty simple. The top of the drive has an aluminum plate (which has been anodized in your color of choice). On this plate is an embossed Seagate logo, and several holes are stamped in a decorative pattern. These holes allow the white power indicator LED to shine through. The back of the drive has a sinle mini USB port, and a USB cable is included. Because the drive inside is a low-power 2.5″ laptop hard drive, there is no need for external power.
Connecting the drive couldn’t be easier. All you do is attach the included USB cable between the drive and your computer. The drive then spins up, the white power indicator LEDs turn on, and within a few seconds the drive is ready for use. The drive works fine when connected to a PC, Mac, and even media devices like the Patriot Box Office ()
The FreeAgent Go drive is extremely quiet. You have to put your ear right next to it to even hear the drive click or the platters spin. The white power LED indicator stays on continuouly. There are no additional lights or flickering to indicate hard drive activity, and in my personal opinion this is a good thing. Blinking lights are rather distracting, especially in a home theater situation, and if there was a problem with the drive I’m sure that it would be apparent. The device doesn’t get very hot either: in a 73 degree room the drive’s top plate measured 80 degrees after running for several hours.
Performance-wise, you really can’t ask any more of the drive. Even a slow drive should be able to use all of the available bandwidth of the USB 2 interface. We plugged our drive up to our USB 3.0 interface (just because the NEC chipset performs so much better than most motherboards’ integrated solutions). According to ATTO, the drive has a consistent 36MB read and write speed. These results were confirmed with HD Tach, which resulted in a 37.9MB/sec transfer rate across all sections of the drive. We usually see a curve of less throughput as the head reaches the inner area of the platter (the bits don’t fly across the head as quickly as they do on the outer edges), but even this “slow” area is enough to saturate the USB 2.0 interface.
The short of the performance test is: This is the absolute best speed you can get from a USB 2.0 drive.
Seagate stands behind their FreeAgent Go series so much that they also offer several handy accessories. Instead of a USB cable, you can plop your drive into a DockStar, which gives you a few additional USB ports and a few media features. There’s even a media dock that works with this drive series, the All in all the Seagate Freeagent Go 500GB Hard Drive is a great device to have around. It performs as well as you could expect from any USB 2.0 device, is very portable, doesn’t produce much heat, and looks great. It’s great in a pinch for backup, movie overflow, or just snorking up files at the LAN party.
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