Seagate FreeAgent Go 500gb disassembly = SAMSUNG HD upgrade for laptop

As some of you may or may not have heard, Seagate recently released their newly redesigned FreeAgent Go series of 2.5" portable hard drives. The beefiest one they offer is 500gb.

These external drives were in stock at my local Best Buy for around $239. They didn't carry any internal 500gb notebook drives yet, so I figured I'd just buy the external, cannibalize it, and give my lappy a nice upgrade.

The purpose of this message is to provide simple instructions on how to disassemble the drive in a careful matter that preserves the casing in case the drive fails at some point in the future (hurray for 5 year warranties!).

There's also an interesting surprise revealed as well, but we'll save that for last.

Step 1: Buy the drive and take it out of the package (duh).



Step 2: Grab a razor blade and slide it between the seam on the front of the drive. The top cover of the case is metal and is attached with a strong adhesive down the length of the drive.



WARNING: The metal cover is HIGHLY bendable, so use care when you take it off. Slight bending is unavoidable, but try to minimize it as much as possible so that you're still able to easily bend it back into proper shape if you need to.

GENTLY lift the front of the cover slightly, then use the razor on the sides as needed.

When you manage to get the cover off, voila!



Step 3: After you have lifted the cover off, take a screwdriver or thin knife to one side of the drive and gently pry it out of the plastic part of the casing.



That's pretty much it! Now for the surprise. Flip the drive over and look at the label.



Yup! That's a SAMSUNG drive in a SEAGATE case. I was rather shocked to discover that, but no matter, it'll still get the job done. If you'd prefer one with a genuine Seagate inside, you may have to wait a while because Seagate doesn't even make a 500gb Momentus yet, but when they do, those Samsungs will likely be phased out.

If you decide to go fishing for one, there's unfortunately no way to tell if you have a Seagate or a Samsung without opening it up because the controller identifies itself as a "Seagate FreeAgent Go" regardless of what's attached. However, if you were gentle with the casing you should be able to stuff it back in there and return it if you want.

I'm cloning my data to the new HD now, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Edit: Clone successful, and the drive identifies as a SAMSUNG HM500LI. So far I've noticed that it runs significantly hotter than my previous drive (a WD 250gb) and has a high power consumption of .87amp versus .55. Factoring in the high price and the poor benchmarks I'm seeing online, I'm going to return it and wait for a Western Digital.

 

Great post their on taking the freeagent apart.
So did your freeagent come with a Samsung drive, or did you put the Samsung drive in the external and use the seagate in your laptop.
It would be hilarious if Seagate used Samsung drives in their enclosures. It would show how the company really feels about their drives

+rep for taking the time to make a nice post and a very informative one

K-TRON

 

Lol. That's a bit strange...

 

Not sure if i believe that a samsung drive was used in a seagate externall hdd enclosure...

 

lol

dang, 10 characters

 

Actually. I rescind my statement. If I am correct, the only 2.5" 500 GB drives on the markets right now are Spinpoint's by Samsung....So really, Seagate is not competing with itself and will undoubtedly switch to its own manufactured 500 GB HDD's when they drop to the gen public.

 

I swear on a stack of bibles that it came with a Samsung drive inside. Go buy one and you'll see for yourself.

I don't think Seagate even makes a 500gb 2.5" drive yet. Googleing for "500gb Seagate Momentus" turns up very little. I think this is a situation where Seagate wanted to be first to market, although the logic in that is bizarre if you ask me, and besides, technically Simpletech already beat them to it. Simpletech used a Hitachi 12.5mm height drive though, which doesn't fit most lappys.

Frankly, I'd much prefer a genuine Seagate drive over a Samsung anyway. In the reviews I've read, the Samsung drive is sluggish when compared against the Hitachi 500gb and even against most 320gb drives.

 

That is true, the only 500gb drives as of now are the samsung hm500li and the hitachi 5k500 series. Its still pretty ironic that seagate sells an external with a samsung drive in it.
The samsung drive is still a very good drive, and samsung harddrives are pretty reliable, in my experience, and the HM160HC I have is wicked fast.

K-TRON

 

Interesting but... $229 ! Isn't that too expensive?

I have found a FREECOM 2,5'' 500GB external drive for only 119euros.
I was wondering what kind of drive is in there...

 

Maybe Samsung but maybe Hitachi of Fujitsu. Only the Samsung is standard 9.5mm high.

And you're right $229 is expensive.

 

It was $239, actually. I think I'll probably end up returning it and then wait for Western Digital's version anyway.

The Samsung runs quite noticeably hotter than my previous drive (a WD 250gb), plus it has a higher power consumption (.87 amp versus .55). Combined with the less than stellar performance benchmarks, I'm not so desperate for space that it justifies the expense.

 

They have 4200rpm Fujitsu drives in them.

 

Yep, unfortunately the benchmarks can be crap, since it's a USB drive, you'd never be able to top it out anyway under normal circumstances. I too am waiting for WD to ship their 500 gig drives, I'm wondering what the hold up is.

 

I prefer 3.5" for 500 GB ...because i have too many USB devices and if i try to run HD on USB power..it ll perform very bad.

Also, 3.5" HDD run more stable & have a more constant speed.


One BIG DISADVANTAGE of 2.5" for 500GB is that its too expensive.

if 500GB 3.5" is $100 .. 500GB 2.5" will be $190..

 

Samsung is only good with LCD and RAM, so HD isn't their specialty.
I wouldn't bet my data's integrity over SamSung.
Also, it was the last one in the rank from Tomshardware's review.

 

Hi XStylus,
thanks for your thread!
We're a german online magazine. Based on your thread a colleague and I wrote a short news to this issue:
http://www.speicherguide.de/Magazin.../7504/Seagate-verbaut-SamsungFestplatten.aspx

Seagate said: the demand ist so high, so they had to buy additional disks from Samsung.The »500 GByte Free Agent« drives are available with Seagate and Samsung disks. There is no sign that a Samsung drive is used, but on retail box should be a badge, that the disk is from korea.

Best regards from munich
Karl

 

If you read this thread, you would find that Seagate does not even make a 500GB 2.5" drive.

 

Seagates »Momentus 5400.6« (5.400 rpm) and »Momentus 7200.4« (7.200 rpm) comes with 500 GByte. The announcement ist from July.
The drives are not yet available in retail and distribution channel, but seagate use them in their own external products and sale them to oem customers.
Greetings
Karl

 

In order to meet strong initial customer demand for the new FreeAgent 500GB 2.5-inch hard drives, Seagate is sourcing both Seagate’s own and – for a limited time – third-party drives. Seagate is early in its volume manufacturing of these new 500GB 2.5-inch hard drives and will completely source our own 500GB drives from our own manufacturing facilities once we can keep pace with demand. Customers should rest assured that Seagate’s industry-leading limited warranties are applied to all of the new products being introduced this year from the Consumer Solutions division, regardless of the third-party components used during the assembly process. All components used in Seagate products are subject to the same rigorous testing as Seagate-manufactured components, to ensure a quality finished product.

 

Its nice to have a Seagate guy here, but after my bad run-ins with numerous faulty seagate drives, I only use Hitachi.

K-TRON

 

Wow, thats very strange... id be more happy with Samsung drive than a seagate anyway. i had 2 Seagates that failed on me. Now i have one Fujutsu and one Samsung that work good for me.

 

Interesting... So in other words, you can acquire a 500gb 7200.4 already?! Lol I'd definitely like to see some benchmarks on this

 

so this shows that SAMSUNG AND other HD brands are better than SEAGATE..ahahaha.....cool..i just got 500gb SEAGATE..AM I SCREWED??

 

Quick question:

How do u clone the drive?

Did u copy and paste the content of all ur C drive to the new drive and then swap them? So u dont have to install windows and all the drivers?

Thxs in advance.

 

JUST READ THE STICKY OUT THERE...ahahaha...DON'T BE LAZY...

 

my bad. didnt know theres a sticky about this (Newbie).

 

Seagate only used the Samsung drive in this enclosure because Seagate did not have a 500gb notebook drive. Samsung, Hitachi and Fujitsu were the only brands which had a 500 gb notebook drive already on the shelves, ready for shipping.
The Samsung drive is the least expensive, which is most likely why it was used.

Plus in my opinion, Samsung drives are better than Seagate ones, so you really win out with the Samsung. Plus the Hm500LI can actually be used in most laptops since it is a standard 9.5mm package. The Hitachi and Fujitsu are in a 12.5mm package.

K-TRON

 

SEAGATE IS ALSO CHEAPER that's why i bought that...

 

XStylus, thanks...

After reading your post, I immediately went out and bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB (cost less than $200 USD) to replace my MBP's Samsung 250GB.

OS X Time Machine helped me migrate all my data to the new drive.

So far, everything is running smoothly.

here are a few pics of my drive and MBP

 

Thanks for the photos.

The Samsung 500GB HDD seems to be relatively power hungry. If you were buying this week, the newly arrived WD5000BEVT is a better option since it uses less power. But, whatever you buy, there's always something better coming.

John

PS: Is there any Mac software for testing the HDD performance? Just in case Samsung have changed from 3 platters to 2 platters. This Samsung web page says maximum capacity 334GB per platter.

 

John, for testing the HDD performance you can give Xbench a try. http://www.xbench.com/


good luck.

 

It's you I want to run the benchmarks for the HDD so we can compare the results with other info.

John

 

LOL, ok John.... I'll run Xbench now and post the results.

ok, here are the results. (i've run the test 2 times)

---------
1st test
---------
Disk Test 31.40
Sequential 50.34
Uncached Write 92.47 56.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 99.26 56.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 20.46 5.99 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 103.13 51.83 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 22.82
Uncached Write 7.57 0.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 69.00 22.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.37 0.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.80 17.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]


----------
2nd test
----------
Disk Test 26.01
Sequential 52.74
Uncached Write 98.10 60.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 98.82 55.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 21.53 6.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 110.04 55.31 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 17.26
Uncached Write 5.28 0.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 71.15 22.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.16 0.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 95.41 17.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]

 

Its a typo. The HM500LI has three 167GB platters, so performance -> ~50MB/s (Read)....
I can't find the datasheet, but found this article.

 

I'm trying to figure them out since they aren't the same as the other benchmarks. I've just run ATTO on my WD5000BEVT since that tests different block sizes. I get about 68MB/s for reading and writing 256k blocks.

You can get the datasheet here by clicking on the specs page. I know that 334 is 2 x 167 and I'm sure that it didn't used to say that. The datasheet still has (3D) in the title as if a 2D version of the drive was planned and it is possible that Samsung will introduce the change without any announcement.

John

PS: The writing on the label looks to be the same as the HM500LI looked at by Tom's Hardware a few months ago.

 

I guess there is a similar 2D HDD available from Samsung - HM320JI....

Probably they are developing a 1TB HDD, 334GB per disk, and 3D....

 

Man I wish I saw this thread sooner. I just bought a seagate freeagent 500gb drive and sure enough the crappy samsung drive was inside. SIGH...returning to the store. I KNEW I should of just bought the western digital....