Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 1.5TB External Hard Drive Review

Saturday Night Backups
At first glance, the Seagate FreeAgent XTreme certainly doesn't strike you as a screaming, balls-to-the-wall enthusiast hard drive. It doesn't set any land speed records, doesn't catch the attention its predecessor did with a fire orange racing stripe, and it doesn't do BMX stunts while drinking Mountain Dew. Instead the streamlined appearance of the drive tells a different tale, that the new generation of FreeAgents is still a worthy contender in today's cutthroat market of external mass storage devices.

The new industrial design offers a few new features over the older FreeAgent Pro, one of the most important being the ability to actually sit horizontally for a more stable footprint. Four rubber feet emblazoned with the Seagate logo clip onto the edges of the drive to prevent it from slipping around, but be careful when repositioning the drive as the feet themselves can easily slip off and get lost. Fans of black monoliths need not get upset though; as Seagate has included a no-slip stand that snaps on to provide added stability for vertical use. Unlike the rubber feet, this won't be getting lost any time soon but you'll also need to be more careful about the cat rubbing against the drive and toppling it over.

The backside of the FreeAgent XTreme has also seen some major improvements, with all 3 interfaces now integrated directly into the drive without the need to swap out interface modules as you would with the FreeAgent Pro. USB 2.0, two FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) ports for daisy-chaining, and the notoriously fast eSATA II are all here, as is a Kensington lock port for physically securing your data. No power switch is present, so if you wish to shut off the drive to conserve power, you will need to manually unplug the unit. Be gentle though, as this reviewer's power cable has already developed a small but manageable short near the DC plug. The new enclosure also runs remarkably cooler than the previous generation did, consistently cool to the touch. If there's a fan inside to make account for this, I can't hear it.

Finally, we have the redesigned front panel, bearing a more simplistic view that's easy on the eyes especially in a dark room. A translucent Seagate logo glows a soft white in the center when connected to the PC, and will pulsate to indicate drive activity. Surrounding the logo are translucent dots in a swirling pattern that leaves a lot to up to interpretation. Are they representative of a starry night, or are they styled after funky disco lighting? My money's on the latter and I'm tempted to color in the dots just to enhance the grooviness.

Backups by Maxtor
Seagate is no longer shipping Memeo Autobackup with their new line of FreeAgent drives, instead opting to use Seagate Manager, a rebadged version of the Maxtor Manager backup software developed for use with their subsidiary's One Touch line of external hard drives. While not as powerful as Memeo's software, the new software package makes backups quick and painless with maximum transparency. The first tab of the Seagate Manager is reminiscent of the older FreeAgent Tools utility, displaying a list of connected FreeAgent drives along with their free space available at a glance. Entering the settings menu allows for adjusting the sleep timeout period of the drive, running a lightweight hardware diagnostic, and optionally switching off the drive's LED indicator light. Yes, I'm also confused as to why it says I have a 2TB drive connected, nice as that would be...

The Backup Tab is very straightforward, giving users the option to either backup just the "My Documents" folder every night at 10:00p, or to schedule a manual backup. By selecting the latter, one may choose folders to be backed up and then filter the content of those folders using predefined categories or a custom whitelist/blacklist of file type extensions. Once that's been taken care of, it's just a matter of selecting what days at what time to perform the backup and whether or not to enable 256-bit AES encryption. With the exception of encryption, all of these settings can be changed at a later time including "My Documents"-only backup plans.

When the Seagate Manager actually performs a backup, either scheduled or manually, it will do so as an incremental backup comprised of individual files as opposed to creating a huge archive file. After the initial backup is completed, only the new or modified files are copied over on subsequent backups for maximum speed. "Current" files are maintained in a Seagate Backup folder organized by the original folder hierarchy, with up to 10 historic file revisions preserved in a separate History folder broken down into Levels to indicate the generation of the file. (Level2, Level3, etc). Files deleted from the source are still maintained in the backup location, located in the Level2 directory. Encrypted backups are handled in the same way, just in a hidden folder because they're essentially useless until they've been decrypted.

Restoring a backup is also straightforward, as you may simply drag-and-drop any backed up file from the Seagate drive to a directory of your choosing in Windows Explorer. Alternatively, you can also perform a Historical Restore, which uses a selection box similar to NTBackup to select what files and what revisions of said files you would like to restore. Unfortunately when using this option, specifying the backup directory is not an option - only the original file location or a temporary directory in your My Documents folder is available. Files that were encrypted are no more difficult to restore than unsecured ones.

As you can see, the Seagate Manager does a fine job of covering all the basic backup requirements for the majority of users out there. However, there are a few shortcomings that I would like to address for power users:

• Individual files may not be included/excluded for backup - only folder selection and extension filtering are available.
• Only one backup plan may be scheduled at a time.
• Backups may only be scheduled once per day, and the time must be uniform across all days. For example, you may not schedule a backup to run at 5:00p on weekdays and 3:00a on weekends.
• You may no longer back up to internal drives, 3rd party external drives, or network shares.
• Contrary to the PDF manual, there is no Online Storage backup option like there was with the older FreeAgent drives. This was confirmed by a Seagate technician.
• There is no suitable replacement for the on-the-fly backups featured with the older FreeAgent drives, so it's possible for you to lose a few hours worth of data if you don't manually run a backup.
• Network shares, even those mounted as drive letters may not be backed up.
• Also, the C:\Windows folder isn't available for backup selection. To be fair, you would need to reinstall Windows anyway if there was a catastrophic system failure since the Seagate manager is not a drive imaging utility.

Seagate Manager Extras
Another feature of the Seagate Manager is the Sync utility, which acts as an automated sneakernet to transfer files between two computers that have the Seagate Manager installed and are running the same operating system. (Windows XP and Vista cannot be mixed). It does this by monitoring folders selected in the same manner as backups are, instantly copying all file additions, changes and deletions to the external drive so that they may be synchronized with the second computer.

Sync is NOT intended for use as a backup utility because multiple file revisions are not maintained, so any accidental corruptions or viruses running amok would be present on the external drive as well. For business folk transferring data between computers at home and the office, Sync would be a very handy utility to have, although users transferring files between two computers at home would most likely benefit more from Windows file sharing over a local area network.

The Security tab is another extra, housing a shortcut to launch the Maxtor Encryption utility. Here you may manually encrypt files and folders for storage on the external drive for transport, as well as decrypt files back to any location before using them. Drag-and-drop is supported as an alternative to using a dialog box, but curiously enough only individual files are supported this way. A copy of the utility is present on the external drive so that you may use it on-the-go as well. Maxtor Encryption is suitable for the occasional encrypted document or folder, but more frequent users may wish to look at using the free open source TrueCrypt utility, which goes above and beyond by giving users plausible deniability and seamless encryption/decryption by mounting encrypted volumes as virtual hard drives.

Xtreme Drive Performance
With a trinity of interfaces to choose from, FreeAgent XTreme will connect to virtually every PC currently in use with the exception of those select few individuals demented enough to cling to Windows 98 and ME. (There's no excuse for you, just let go already!) Of course, drive performance is directly impacted by what interface is being used such that eSATA is faster than FireWire, which is faster than USB 2.0, also known as the slow, ugly yet somehow practical stepsister of the bunch that manifests herself in your dreams EVERYWHERE. Oh, did I mention that we write a website dedicated to her?

All tests performed below were conducted on an Intel Xeon E3110 desktop utilizing an Asus P5K-E/WiFi-AP motherboard with an Intel P35 (ICH9) chipset to handle the USB connections, an Agere FW322 FireWire controller, and a JMicron JMB363 eSATA controller.

In HD Tach RW, the 1.5TB FreeAgent XTreme managed burst speeds of 31.3MB/s with a sustained read and write of 30.8MB/s and 24.1MB/s respectively which is more than tolerable, however the burst speed is roughly 2MB/s shy of what I am accustomed to seeing in past reviews. Upgrading to FireWire 400 (1394a) will bump those numbers to a burst speed of 42.3MB/s with average read and write speeds of 40.2MB/s and 30.4MB/s, about a 30% boost overall. Taking the lead is eSATA, with an unhindered 224MB/s burst speed with read and write speeds of 93.5MB/s and 75.2MB/s. It is here that you will actually start to see performance naturally degrade towards the outer regions of the drive where the sectors spin slower than they do at the center.

HDTach result for eSATA interface

HDTach result for FireWire 400 interface

HDTach result for USB interface

Real-world file copy tests were performed using Microsoft Robocopy to move a 3.6GB ISO file between the FreeAgent XTreme and a defragmented Seagate 7200.10 internal SATA drive. Here we see that the USB and FireWire 400 tests line up pretty close with our synthetic HD Tach benchmarks, however eSATA performance has dropped significantly down to more realistic 59.5MB/s read and 47.7MB/s write speeds, both still respectable numbers.

A fair warning though, if you plan on making use of the eSATA interface it's possible that you may encounter issues with drive lockups causing the host computer to come to a grinding halt for up to 20 seconds at a time. These problems seemingly correspond to the drive controller being used, so switching to a different eSATA controller may fix things. In my case under Windows XP 32-bit, I would experience random freezes where the drive would restart itself while it was plugged into my on-board JMicron eSATA controller regardless of the driver version used, yet had no issues while using a PCI Express card eSATA controller with a Silicon Image chipset. Strangely enough in an identical system running Windows Vista 64-bit, the JMicron controller did not cause any lockups.

Other users on the Seagate forums have reported that disabling the Sleep functionality within the Seagate Manager has allegedly resolved their issues with the interface. I do wonder though just how many users will mistake the sound of the drive heads parking during these unexpected resets with the dreaded "click of death" sound indicative of drive failure. For now it looks like USB and FireWire are still in the game.

Recap
I'm not following the reasoning behind Seagate's use of the 'XTreme' moniker considering that the new FreeAgent doesn't set any record benchmarks or do anything particularly out of the ordinary for an external desktop hard drive. The new drive enclosure did add some much-needed improvements to base stability, heat dissipation, physical security and integrated all of the drive interfaces, while the new Seagate Manager software by Maxtor is a bit toned down from last year's software package but still gets the job done. With a reasonable street price hovering around $230, the FreeAgent XTreme reasonably safeguards your data with a plethora of options to satisfy all but the most demanding of consumers. But now that the XTreme name has been used, I can only hope that next year we don't see Seagate slip further down the slope of hyperactive product names with the launch of a FreeAgent XTreme MAXX 9000 Ultra Elite Firestorm Edition.