External Hard Drive Reviews

My newest external harddrive reviews

Posted by Randy in Hardware on March 20, 2009

I recently lost around 750GB of data. This was due to my trust in a brand new 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent drive. I wanted to move some data around and during the move, the drive died. So, needless to say, the drive was exchanged.

The 1.5TB drive used a standard 3.5 inch internal hard drive. I've had some bad luck with many of the newer drives. I'm pretty sure that the quality of drives in general has deminished as the capacity has increased. SATA drives in particular have given me much grief.

I decided to try out the Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB drive even though it was a third of the size of the original drive I had purchased. The 1.5TB drive had firewire, USB 2.0, and eSATA. This wide variety of connections was a major factor in my decision to purchase it. The 500gb Go only had USB 2.0. This made it quite a bit less appealing.

That is about the only cons to the drive. There are, however, many pros. First of all, the drive doesn't require any external power. It is completely powered from the USB port. This is especially useful in that one isn't required to carry around a power supply. Also the USB port is standard mini USB, which is useful when you have about

Secondly, the drive is quiet. Many of the larger(physical size, not capacity) drives seem to be noisy. Some of this noise comes from the power adapter and the rest comes from drive itself. At any rate, this drive makes no noise.

Finally, the drive is ultra portable. Since there is no external power needed, the drive and the mini USB cable are all one must carry around. The drive itself is small. It will fit in a pants or jacket pocket. I would rather carry a 500GB drive around in my pocket than a 32GB thumbdrive.

It also appears to be much more reliable than the 1.5TB FreeAgent. This could be related to the type of drive used, since this uses a 2.5 inch notebook hard drive versus the 3.5 inch desktop hard drive used in the 1.5TB FreeAgent.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend the 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent. There are reports that there are problems with these drives. However, I do recommend the 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go. It's small, portable, and more reliable.