Some of Customer Reviews Seagate 1 TB Portable External Hard Drive FreeAgent Go USB 2.0;

• Much Better Than Western Digital, January 5, 2010

By Benjamin Hooft “bennythesoundman” (Sydney, Australia)

A far better alternative to Western Digital’s `equivalent’ 1TB My Passport model. For a start this Seagate model has a stock-standard Mini-USB connector (not a Micro-USB connector like the Western Digital) so you can use one of the dozens of cables you already have sitting in your drawer. More importantly the Mini-USB connector stays plugged in, with a strong enough grip to hang the drive from the cable without the connection breaking. The installed software is easily erasable, either by deleting or formatting. Finally the 5-year warranty is also better than Western Digital’s & while I don’t know what the situation is in the US here in Australia Western Digital require you (the customer) to send a faulty product overseas (to Singapore) at your expense for a warranty repair taking several weeks. Last time I checked Seagate had a pre-paid courier service taking several days at no cost to you.

Now the Seagate is larger & heavier than the Western Digital but there appears to be a good reason for this. The Western Digital does NOT have a real SATA drive inside, indeed the actual internal drive has a custom board with a USB connector (just read the reviews) – this would save a great deal of space. What this means is if you want to rip out the drive later & use it as an internal drive you’re fresh out of luck. The Seagate on the other hand appears to have a proper 5400RPM SATA drive installed (though I haven’t opened mine). Incidentally for those who aren’t aware the 1TB 2.5″ drives currently use 3 platters which means they are generally thicker & heavier than the lower capacity models, like 500GB (which use 2 platters).

An excellent buy & it would appear that this 1TB model has already hit the sweet spot, it’s cheaper per Gigabyte than the 500GB model & far cheaper than the 320GB model.

Works just fine, WD – you lost out due to your silliness, November 30, 2009
By Rahul Garg (Mumbai)

Pros: 1 TB capacity (931 gb actual available ), no external power needed, not a whole lot thicker than the 2 platter drives (see the 2 images I’ve added) (Update on this: Just recently, my cousin purchased a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go drive and this 1TB drive is nearly double the thickness of the 500GB drive…it’s also thinner than my silver WD 500GB drive (which I have shown in the pics)…kinda sucks as to why my WD drive is not as thin as the 500GB FreeAgent Go drive), decent speeds, removable software, mini usb connector

Cons: Not too much of cons for me:
Weight (feels almost double the weight of the thinner drives), thickness (hey, it would still be nice if these were thinner) – it’s certainly not double the thickness, barely 0.3 inches thicker than my 500GB WD drive.

Other Thoughts: In all honesty, I would never have considered buying this drive if I hadn’t read all the negative reviews that have been posted for the comparable 1TB drive from WD (look for it’s amazon page). I was shocked to read all those reviews since I was quite excited originally when WD released the 1TB hdd. This drive luckily does not suffer from those 2 main issues i.e. it uses a usb mini connector and the software is easily removed. I bet WD is having a hard time dealing with a lot of returns due to their silly move. Luckily for me I waited, read those reviews so I was able to make a better decision. Regarding the speeds, I copied some files over and here is what I got (approximately):
45.6 GB (~29,000 files) – ~80 mins
293 GB (~1,000 files) – ~7 hours (I did not see this through completion but XP informed me about 224 mins left after ~3 hours of copying files, so 7 hrs is going by that figure).
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• Much better than Western Digital, November 30, 2009

By goaliefight

Just picked this up over the weekend and it is a great drive. It’s very quiet and does not generate a lot of heat. I like it better than the 1TB Western Digital because it does not have that annoying VCD crippleware.

Buy It or see complete Features and More Reviews Seagate 1 TB Portable External Hard Drive FreeAgent Go USB 2.0

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