Seagate Announces New 2TB External Drives
By Craig Lloyd on May 27th, 2009 at 8:07AM
Seagate announced yesterday two new additions to their FreeAgent line of external hard drives; the 2TB FreeAgent Desk and the 2TB FreeAgent XTreme. Differences between the two? The Desk basically just has a USB interface, while the XTreme allows you to use either USB, eSATA or Firewire. That’s the only noticeable difference that we know of so far.
Seagate must also be using their new Barracuda Low Power drives in these 2TB FreeAgent models, since it’s their only 2TB consumer hard drive that they currently manufacturer. Sounds good to me.
The 2TB XTreme and Desk are $330 and $300, respectively and are both available now.
Is the eSATA and Firewire capabilities worth the exra $30? We’ll see when we review the drives next week.
i really love the design of Seagate externals…they just look so much better than most of the WD drives i’ve seen/owned.
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I definitely like the status light designs on their FreeAgent series, but I have to say the shape is kind of weird looking.
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I also agree the seagates look alot better. On a side note… i would imagine esata would be better than usb substantially, when they tested usb vs esata thumbdrives they got nearly 90MB/s on esata and 15MB/s or so with usb.
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eSATA is definitely quicker than USB by far. I think the capabilities of choosing between all three data interfaces (like the XTreme) will be very handy.
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