The Seagate Free agent GO External Hard drive
Now, for some of us, we need portability, and hence man made laptop. But for most of us, a memory which carried as much as what a hard drive can hold and want to make it as easy as plug in, hence man made external 2.5 Hard Drive. I wanted to write a review based on an external hard drive. I know I had a Seagate 2.5 hard drive on a Chinese aluminum casing. But thanks to a great friend of mine who helped me a lot over ages even till now, this is the Review, comparison and First Impression of my article after being the motm-The versatile featured Seagate free agent.
[BREAK=The packaging-Where the dude sleeps]
The Packaging
The package is a standard carton box with lots of sentences on the side. They got nothing to do with the ratings, but they were hilarious and irrelevant- like the sentence “what’s wrong with the hair†on the left and “work in the pajamas†on the right hand side. The first thing you observe is the warranty. Portable hard drive makers are cashing in on warranty, speed and the suite. If someone picks this piece up, it should give an idea on what are you buying. However-
This is what I would say as a user-I need this hard drive to be compatible with Mac, windows and Linux machines. Here are the following cons on the package:
So I opened the box, which shows a good and secured package:
After opening the cardboard “gateâ€:
After opening, you find the cable and the hard drive sealed in an anti-static bag.
There ya go a non gloss black body with the orange Seagate symbol.
[BREAK=The piece and other short stories (including the software analysis):]
The piece and other short stories (including the software analysis):
When the hard drive is connected, the light illuminates yellow brightly, but not to an irritating level. Rather then going on and off when there is activity, it lowers and increases the brightness level of the light. That is a good touch and one of the minor (when I say minor, I mean irrelevant with the rating).
Now on the base, it has 4 small rubber dots for a good grip on the surface.
The base has all those certifications, the serial code. The piece is made and assembled in China. Now one thing I would love to see this on the piece is the capacity. It’s rather a scratch rather then a con, but if I give this to someone, it will be nice to see any indication of the maximum capacity. But it doesn’t. They could have included that small detail next to the product’s name on the hard drive.
=
The plug-in interface
Now the picture is self explanatory. Towards the left is the standard interface which you get when you plug-in. Now on the right, you not only get the standard interface, but also an auto detect interface courtesy of the software ceedo. The ceedo’s standard interface is like start-program
Now the ceedo software has the Microsoft applications, outlook express and internet explorer which are a great add-on. Unfortunately if you want to add a program to the hard drive, you need to buy online a full version of ceedo. In my opinion, it sucks. The inbuilt software is nice, but not convincing enough. They should have put the complete software from the beginning.
Before I wanted to conclude the inbuilt software as “uselessâ€, I wanted to give chance to Seagate. I installed the tools and they had pretty good package:
On the left is the content of the fold and on the right is the utility. This is has folder sync control which does indeed sets the brand away from the assembled casing option. There might be some software which lets the assembled casing to have its own auto sync option, but I didn’t bother to search. On the left, it has diagnostics, sleep interval and drive light option which I was curious at first, but later it answered the question-yes you can turn off the lights. Now the tool software is on the hard drive and it installs on your computer. This is a great goodie; unfortunately they should have put these contents on a mini cd just in case if one had to format it.
Also, I would like to say one thing, this is NTFS on default, so it cannot be plugged anything below windows 2000, but it’s not of any concern.
[BREAK=Comparison: The brand Vs. the 2.5 Casing and conclusion:]
Comparison: The brand Vs. the 2.5 Casing:
The brand vs. the assembled casing hard drive. Both have Seagate 2.5 inch hard drive. The purple one has a 40 GB however. So this isn’t a battle comparison but rather a standard comparison for a reason that the speed on the assembled one is purely based on the usb interface which differs a lot.
=
The software used to test these two hard drives is HD tune. I did check out 200mph’s to the point article on WD’s counterpart. So first is the casing’s score:
Test Machine:
AMD opteron 165 clocked to 2.8 GHz with 4 GB ddr1
Asus a8n sli premium edition
And these are the freeagent’s scores:
The Seagate freeagent gets a huge advantage at almost half of the CPU usage compared with the casing. Seagate freeagent seems to be having a “good enough†transfer rate compared to this.
Conclusion:
Truth is told about this device, it depends on the user. Sure, you can get more GB if you put a 2.5 hard drive on a casing. But you could get better transfer rates on external hard drives such as this, but then again one can get a good transfer rate from those brand casings-like vantec or transcend- no this is not transcend, these are 1 year old hard drive and casing which I got the casing for 150 bucks. I wish I have the premium casing to test that, but alas I do not. According to my sources, 80GB prices are high and what 200mph mentioned on his review is right. I didn’t check out the price since it’s a gift, but assuming if I was a buyer, I might get this between 3.3k to 3.5k!! As a brand, I will give this a decent 4 out of 5 Overall. Even though the pro level of ceedo can let you add programs, but this would suffice. I would have given a 4.5 but After 5-10 minutes (in idle), though the purple case was cool, the Seagate free agent was warm and under load it would vibrates more then it should compared to the slim casing, which has no rubber protection at all.
Now, for some of us, we need portability, and hence man made laptop. But for most of us, a memory which carried as much as what a hard drive can hold and want to make it as easy as plug in, hence man made external 2.5 Hard Drive. I wanted to write a review based on an external hard drive. I know I had a Seagate 2.5 hard drive on a Chinese aluminum casing. But thanks to a great friend of mine who helped me a lot over ages even till now, this is the Review, comparison and First Impression of my article after being the motm-The versatile featured Seagate free agent.
[BREAK=The packaging-Where the dude sleeps]
The Packaging
The package is a standard carton box with lots of sentences on the side. They got nothing to do with the ratings, but they were hilarious and irrelevant- like the sentence “what’s wrong with the hair†on the left and “work in the pajamas†on the right hand side. The first thing you observe is the warranty. Portable hard drive makers are cashing in on warranty, speed and the suite. If someone picks this piece up, it should give an idea on what are you buying. However-
This is what I would say as a user-I need this hard drive to be compatible with Mac, windows and Linux machines. Here are the following cons on the package:
- They provided pre-loaded software, but they should have given a software cd just in case if you had to format the whole format and if you want it later.
- The sentence “If you’re a Mac person, sorry, freeagent Go software and drive formatting works only with Windows, but you can reformat for Mac using disk utility†and then “and enjoy all those glorious gigabytes†is bad turnoff especially with so many competitors who will love to eat Seagate up like a shark eating a fish. Why not make the software which is compatible with Mac and windows, or heck put the mac/ linux software counterpart on the cd idea I suggested above. A technically sound guy would rather pick a laptop hd and a casing to save money and get more space and the casual Mac user would just keep this package aside and get something else.
- Minimum specs are vague. They should mention this for Mac, Linux and Windows.
So I opened the box, which shows a good and secured package:
After opening the cardboard “gateâ€:
After opening, you find the cable and the hard drive sealed in an anti-static bag.
There ya go a non gloss black body with the orange Seagate symbol.
[BREAK=The piece and other short stories (including the software analysis):]
The piece and other short stories (including the software analysis):
When the hard drive is connected, the light illuminates yellow brightly, but not to an irritating level. Rather then going on and off when there is activity, it lowers and increases the brightness level of the light. That is a good touch and one of the minor (when I say minor, I mean irrelevant with the rating).
Now on the base, it has 4 small rubber dots for a good grip on the surface.
The base has all those certifications, the serial code. The piece is made and assembled in China. Now one thing I would love to see this on the piece is the capacity. It’s rather a scratch rather then a con, but if I give this to someone, it will be nice to see any indication of the maximum capacity. But it doesn’t. They could have included that small detail next to the product’s name on the hard drive.
=
The plug-in interface
Now the picture is self explanatory. Towards the left is the standard interface which you get when you plug-in. Now on the right, you not only get the standard interface, but also an auto detect interface courtesy of the software ceedo. The ceedo’s standard interface is like start-program
Now the ceedo software has the Microsoft applications, outlook express and internet explorer which are a great add-on. Unfortunately if you want to add a program to the hard drive, you need to buy online a full version of ceedo. In my opinion, it sucks. The inbuilt software is nice, but not convincing enough. They should have put the complete software from the beginning.
Before I wanted to conclude the inbuilt software as “uselessâ€, I wanted to give chance to Seagate. I installed the tools and they had pretty good package:
On the left is the content of the fold and on the right is the utility. This is has folder sync control which does indeed sets the brand away from the assembled casing option. There might be some software which lets the assembled casing to have its own auto sync option, but I didn’t bother to search. On the left, it has diagnostics, sleep interval and drive light option which I was curious at first, but later it answered the question-yes you can turn off the lights. Now the tool software is on the hard drive and it installs on your computer. This is a great goodie; unfortunately they should have put these contents on a mini cd just in case if one had to format it.
Also, I would like to say one thing, this is NTFS on default, so it cannot be plugged anything below windows 2000, but it’s not of any concern.
[BREAK=Comparison: The brand Vs. the 2.5 Casing and conclusion:]
Comparison: The brand Vs. the 2.5 Casing:
The brand vs. the assembled casing hard drive. Both have Seagate 2.5 inch hard drive. The purple one has a 40 GB however. So this isn’t a battle comparison but rather a standard comparison for a reason that the speed on the assembled one is purely based on the usb interface which differs a lot.
=
The software used to test these two hard drives is HD tune. I did check out 200mph’s to the point article on WD’s counterpart. So first is the casing’s score:
Test Machine:
AMD opteron 165 clocked to 2.8 GHz with 4 GB ddr1
Asus a8n sli premium edition
And these are the freeagent’s scores:
The Seagate freeagent gets a huge advantage at almost half of the CPU usage compared with the casing. Seagate freeagent seems to be having a “good enough†transfer rate compared to this.
Conclusion:
Truth is told about this device, it depends on the user. Sure, you can get more GB if you put a 2.5 hard drive on a casing. But you could get better transfer rates on external hard drives such as this, but then again one can get a good transfer rate from those brand casings-like vantec or transcend- no this is not transcend, these are 1 year old hard drive and casing which I got the casing for 150 bucks. I wish I have the premium casing to test that, but alas I do not. According to my sources, 80GB prices are high and what 200mph mentioned on his review is right. I didn’t check out the price since it’s a gift, but assuming if I was a buyer, I might get this between 3.3k to 3.5k!! As a brand, I will give this a decent 4 out of 5 Overall. Even though the pro level of ceedo can let you add programs, but this would suffice. I would have given a 4.5 but After 5-10 minutes (in idle), though the purple case was cool, the Seagate free agent was warm and under load it would vibrates more then it should compared to the slim casing, which has no rubber protection at all.
hyeah: 
