Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable Hard Drive Review

Second generation FreeAgent Go
Seagate's second generation FreeAgent Go portable hard drive is an absolute stunner from the moment you lay your eyes on the sleek enclosure wrapped in clam-shell packaging. Unraveling it you'll find the drive itself, a lengthy Y-USB cable with 2 USB Type A connectors on one end and a mini-USB Type B connector on the other to plug into the FreeAgent Go, and a rather short and brief user guide that could have used a fair bit more work.

The FreeAgent Go's enclosure is metallic and still quite light. The chassis is also very well sealed against any accidental spills and should be able to withstand damage during handling for quite a few years. The top features a Seagate logo, which lights up white when connected to a computer's USB port, and provides no pulsing or flashing indication on activity, contrary to both Userguide and Seagate Manager application which state the lighting on the drive should flicker during activity.

Seagate provides multiple variants of the FreeAgent Go with various drive capacities and colors to match users needs and desires. They are purchasable in 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB capacities and a choice of Titanium Silver, Tuxedo Black, Ruby Red, Royal Blue, Sky Blue, Solar Orange, Think Pink, Champagne Gold, Spring Green and Forest Green colors. I highly recommend readers check out Seagate's website for a preview of the colors on offer and appropriate model number to ensure you get the color you want. Today's review will focus on the Titanium Silver 500GB FreeAgent Go.

The FreeAgent Go comes in a whopping ten different colors.

Size comparison to everyday item.

The FreeAgent Go comes with printed userguide that is fairly simplistic given the Seagate Manager software's complexity; fortunately, Seagate included a more in-depth user guide on the hard drive itself, which covers all of the basics and more of the software. The user guide also incorrectly refers to a single USB Type A connector cable instead of the included Y-USB Type A connector cable which someone at Seagate must have missed before the product shipped.

I tested the drive with both the included Y-USB cable and a standard single USB cable on a desktop and laptop, both of which worked fine. For those users using this 5400-rpm drive on notebooks manufactured before the year 2000, you may need to plug both ends of the Y-USB cable into your notebook to supply sufficient current to power the hard drive since some notebooks feature USB ports unable to supply the full 500mA required by the USB specification.

Optional accessories are available in the form of a desktop hard drive dock which allows the Seagate FreeAgent Go to easily connect to your desktop without having to find an open USB port on your desktop and fidget with moving USB cables aside. The accessory kit also features a handy leather travel case to package your FreeAgent Go drive into for added protection from the elements. Personally, I favor WD's Passport line of hard drive cases which protects the hard-drive all-around and has a zipper to help seal up the unit for maximum protection.

The FreeAgent Go's optional hard drive dock retails for $20 last time I checked.

The FreeAgent Go's optional accessory kit also includes this leatherette case.

Seagate Manager - Automated Backup, Encryption
The FreeAgent Go comes pre-loaded with Seagate's own Seagate Manager software to help users manage their automated incremental backups of vital files; synchronize specific folders from their desktops/notebooks to the drive; and configure the FreeAgent Go's various options ranging from power management, enclosure lighting options to accessing the encryption software included with the drive.

Seagate Manager software gives the option to conduct daily or weekly scheduled backups of user specified folders or sychronize folder contents whenever the FreeAgent Go hard drive is connected. Unfortunately, the software does not support any other 3rd party hard drives and locks users into using Seagate hard drives exclusively. I would have liked to see Seagate offer support for backing up data onto other manufacturers hard drives as well since I utilize multiple portable hard drives for our own backup solution already and having only one backup software solution installed would have been ideal rather than multiple solutions from multiple manufacturers.

The encryption software is not aided by any on-board dedicated processor (unlike the Lenovo Secure drive) to handle the encryption process, but instead all encryption is dependant on your computer's processing capability. For the average user the protection offered by software encryption should suffice but needless to say, for the price I expected a more robust security solution integrated into the drive. Thankfully, the encryption software does not have to be installed on the computer connected to the Seagate FreeAgent Go, but instead it can easily be launched on any Windows XP or Vista computer via the autoplay options menu that appears once the drive is connected. The software is, however, restricted to Windows XP and Vista operating system users only. No similar Mac or Linux compatible software is supplied which is unfortunate since Linux users are often left empty-handed with software features pre-installed on USB peripherals.

FreeAgent Go's Performance

SiSoft Sandra 2009 scores for the FreeAgent Go hard drive are very good and indicative of above average results with 256MB file sizes taking the lead for both read at 30.6MB/s and write at 20MB/s. Smaller file size performance drops off with 256KB to 64MB ranging between 22 to 27MB/s for read and between 13 to 17MB/s for write. 512B file size performance is, as expected, the slowest scoring only 8.82 Megabytes/second for read and 0.04MB/s for write speeds.

Since I also had the Western Digital Passport portable hard drive available as a comparison I decided to put it to the test against the FreeAgent Go to see if last years generation of portable external hard drives could still compete with todays offering. Using Microsoft's Robocopy, the WD Passport drive scored a maximum of 20.2MB/s reading a 699MB ISO image file from the drive while the Seagate FreeAgent Go scored 32.5MB/s. A quite significant lead for the FreeAgent Go. Using the FreeAgent Go hard drive dock optional accessory the performance for read also only dropped slightly to 32MB/s which is expected since the addition of another USB hub between the drive and host would only add latency. Write performance showed similar results with the WD Passport reaching only 18.1MB/s whereas the FreeAgent Go scored 22.7MB/s without the dock accessory and 22.5MB/s docked.

I also conducted a simple benchmark on the encryption software to give readers a taste of the average time taken to encrypt a file. Using a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor and ASUS P5B Deluxe WiFi motherboard with 5GB of memory, the software took approximately 515 seconds (8 minutes 30 seconds) to encrypt a 699 MB ISO image file to the FreeAgent Go. Given that the drive can easily achieve a sustained 20MB/s write speed, it would have made sense for Seagate to take advantage of a dedicated encryption processor to maintain the same level of performance as unencrypted access.

For the record, while the drive can be powered via the included Y-USB cable or a standard single connector USB cable, I opted to use the included Y-USB cable for all performance testing to stay true to the user experience. I also conducted some initial testing using only a single connector USB cable but noticed no difference in performance.

Recap
The Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB is a remarkably designed piece of USB hardware that is fully featured with the included software and able to withstand a fair bit of use. It's portability and size make it ideal for the mobile computer user and the capacities offered should suit everyone's needs. If it were up to us I would only honestly have offered a 500GB model since todays users have far too much to lose from data corruption. Seagate did a very decent job in bringing us a new wave of portable storage solutions with a great warranty period and good user experience. The value added software suite included in Seagate Manager is sufficient, however, Seagate's lack of offering a similar suite for Mac OS X and Linux users is not.