Hard Drive & Storage - News & Reviews

Seagate FreeAgent Pro USB/eSATA/FireWire external hard drive

The Seagate FreeAgent Pro looks like a NAS drive. It’s a desktop drive bundled with a backup application that makes it easy to copy your data to a variety of portable devices or to the online storage service. FreeAgent Tools software is easy to use and highly configurable. The Seagate FreeAgent Pro is a great device for storage, backup, and sharing.

Design:

The FreeAgent Pro family includes six members in three capacities: 320GB, 500GB, and 750GB. And each capacity comes in two versions: USB 2.0/eSATA or USB 2.0/eSATA/FireWire 400. All capacities offer a 7,200rpm drive. It’s wrapped in a smooth, black case, and the narrow sides of the drive are trimmed in orange, which glows when the drive is powered on.

The Box contains, FreeAgent Pro data mover drive, FreeAgent software and electronic documentation preloaded on the data mover drive, includes USB 2.0 & eSATA interfaces as well as dual FireWire 400 interface module, USB 2.0 cable & FireWire cable (eSATA cable not included), AC power adapter, Quick start guide.

Key Features:

• Automatically the contents can be moved to multiple locations.
• pictures can be shared online
• Online space can be shared and accessed 24/7
• Automatic revisions of your content help keep you safe from goof-ups
• Five-year limited warranty
• Preloaded software
• Power on/off touch point
• Modular interface “future-proofs” technology
• USB 2.0/eSATA and dual FireWire interface modules available today
• Up to 320 glorious gigabytes of storage
• OS supported Windows Vista, Windows 2000 Professional, XP Professional, or XP Home Edition

Qualities:

• FreeAgent Pro software and drive formatting works only with Windows, but drive can be reformatted for Mac using Disk Utility:

Power PC G3, G4, or G5 processor running OS X 10.3.9 (or higher), or Intel Core Duo or Core Solo processor running OS X 10.4.6 (or higher)

• eSATA connectivity offers fast transfer speeds.

Drawbacks:

• Software installation is a bit slow
• Accessing your data “anywhere” requires you to have the foresight to upload it to the Internet Drive and potentially purchase more online storage capacity from Seagate;
• Shutterfly is the only online photo service it works with.

Comments:

The Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive is an elegant workaround for users who are intimidated by NAS drives. We really like this external hard drive as the bundled software is simple to use and makes copying your data to various location.