Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB External Hard Drive Review
Portability is becoming a major factor for consumers nowadays and it is good to see smaller units doing the jobs of previously larger ones (netbook versus notebook comes to mind). This freedom of movement reminds me of a free agent in a professional sporting league, that is able go anywhere he/she wants. Technology in general is so amazing that whenever you think you’ve seen it all, something comes along that changes your perspective. After getting used to the idea of a big difference between a USB flash drive and a hard drive, the Seagate FreeAgent Go fills the gap perfectly, balancing the scale as an elegantly crafted “hybrid” if you will.
They say that nice things come in small packages and a good example of this is to have 500GB of storage in a device that is barely larger than my smartphone. The FreeAgent Go is just such a package and today we put it in the spotlight and take a closer look to see if it lives up to its billing.
| Device | Small? | Lightweight? | Lots of storage? |
| USB Flash Drive | Yes | Yes | No |
| External Hard Drive Enclosure | No | No | Yes |
| Seagate FreeAgent Go | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The drive comes preloaded with Seagate Manager, which I will get to in a bit, and muvee Reveal 8.0 which was reviewed here. This is a winning combination if you ask me. Let us get into some more detail.
Personally I prefer to roll my own external drives. I always think it is a rip off that products like this one do not include an e-sata port on them, like my Vantec NexStar CX housing does and it wasn’t an expensive housing either.
To be fair to Seagate, they are hardly the only vendor of pre-built external drives that don’t include e-sata, but that is still no excuse when you consider the profits over the bare drives these external products rake in for the vendors.
Well I would imaging that some of the products of this type would support e-SATA but that is where it comes down to you, the consumer. Either shop around for what you really want or you make do with an option that fits your pocket.
I also had an enclosure that had both USB and e-SATA support but for some really strange reason, I have never been able to get my e-SATA working. Weird!
What I’m really waiting for is for Seagate to move the industry to total solid state drives.
hi, great blog post. will come back later.