Seagate Freeagent go

I just bought the above product (the 250 Gig) and I got to say I love the speed. I went to Best Buy to actually buy a flash drive and saw this drive. What is your guy's thoughts?

 

Love it. I use mine all the time and have had zero problems with it. There's a thread floating around here at NBR where I posted a review on it some time ago. You can do a search or just click the link in my sig below.

 

Nice thread. Yea, I wasn't totally sure about buying an external hard drive, but I am glad I did. I did some research on external HDs early last year when I was looking at them, I was pretty much convinced that the Seagate was the best in terms of pros/cons.

 

Seagate externals tend to have higher failure rates than other drives. Don't keep anything important on it that you don't already have backed up elsewhere.

 

I disagree. My Seagate FreeAgent Go 160GB (the older brown and amber type) is still running great, and plus, its unbeatable 5-year warranty is still not up

Hard drive failure is largely based on chance, and unless there is some defect on a drive (a few Seagate Barracuda 3.5" drives had a firmware issue before), it's really plain dumb luck for when a hard drive fails.

 

Pretty much a useless question - what are your thoughts...

The key advantage of a portable HDD is its data capacity - I have a 500GB WD Passport - try to get that on Flash drives... I'll pass - its downside is that its not shock resistant.

If you have a use for that space then a portable HDD is a good buy.

Speed - an internal one is faster, but I think few USB drives are that fast at the moment.

 

I hate Seagate now. I bought a 1.5 TB Seagate USB drive, and it's the most annoying drive ever. It goes into and out of sleep mode randomly, and in sleep mode it becomes invisible to the computer. So constantly I have the "ding" noise Windows makes when you add a device.

Even when the computer is OFF, it will just turn on in the middle of the night.

Also, it has NO POWER SWITCH. There is no way to make it park the heads and switch off. I don't know what I'll do with the drive when I move in a month or so.

 

Check if there are any settings in the bundled Freeagent Tools - I know that I can change whether or not my Freeagent Go goes to sleep, along with a few other settings.

Well, you could ship it to me...

 

I just dropped had my powered external drop 2ft onto an uncarpeted floor only to make the click of death yesterday. Today I went out looking for a replacement and lo and behold I found this:


and purchased it along with a 1tb WD Caviar black. The eSATA speed can't be beat and while it's not exactly portable, or even particularly pretty, it is quite functional (I now have easy access to about 5 SATA drives that I didn't have USB adapters for).

*edit*
as for portable drives I use a 120gb 1.8" drive with a USB adapter... it isn't super fast, but OTOH with the USB interface that really doesn't matter (averages 24.9mb/s on HDTune).

 

I copied the Freeagent tools to my PC before I formatted the Seagate, but now I can't find them. To get them from the Seagate website you have to submit a support request or some crap.

I think I tried the software though and it had nothing useful.

 

Most drives don't have a power switch, but they'll park their head when idle.

And if they have a power switch it'll do the same as unplugging the power supply.

 

If a drive has a soft power switch like my firewire Seagate and a Maxtor I have, then it will shut down the drive and park the heads

 

I've got a 500gb freeagent go, and absolutely love it. Got rid of the annoying software (which isn't as bad as WD's) and carry it around with me everywhere. Never had problems with seagate drives either.

 

I have a 500Gb FreeAgent Go as well and it's served me fine so far! While it is less fast than other drives(due to being USB as well as 5400RPM), it's highly portable and convenient for me I'm not too worried about failures; as mentioned before, there's a 5 year warranty and most of the data on the FreeAgent is on both of my computers sooo

 

i had a 320gb FreeAgent Go. i dropped it from probably two feet, maybe less. it didnt hit any corner but landed kind of flat with a smack...
when i plugged it in again, it did absolutely noting. so i pried it open, (pain in the butt) got a new usb to sata interface, and its working fine. it makes a seek noise too fast for too long at first, but then it works.

i wonder whats to be said for seagate about this? not sure. id rather not question my luck

 

I have the accomdata 1TB external.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...216041&cm_re=accomdata-_-22-216-041-_-Product

Best external I ever bought. Comes with this HD in it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822152102

32mb cache, 7200 RPM. Sleeps soundly doesn't lose its connection with windows, has a usb 2.0 interface and esata interface both of which work flawlessly. Also has a power switch.

EDIT: I know newegg says 16MB cache, but they're wrong.