Tech Olive

It’s now getting to that point where higher capacity bus-powered hard drives are becoming more mainstream. Storage companies slowly started creeping up to 500GB and until just recently, it was stuck there. Now they’ve discovered how to fit more layers into the portable 2.5-inch platform, meaning twice the storage space. Seagate’s 1TB portable FreeAgent Go drive is a great example and they gave us the opportunity to check it out for ourselves.

Up front, the biggest difference from the traditional FreeAgent Go is the size and weight. You can see it’s a bit thicker and it also weighs a tad more, obviously due to the larger storage capacity. Thing is though, this isn’t your everyday, walk-in-the-park 2.5-inch laptop drive. It’s been modified to squeeze in three platters, so don’t expect to break open the enclosure and use the drive in your laptop, because it won’t work.

Despite the 1TB capacity being powered by a lonely USB connection, this drive is pretty fast, but nothing we haven’t seen. It’s not about performance here because after all, it’s only a 5400RPM drive. We moved a 1.1GB file in 36 seconds, which equates to just under 31 MB/s; pretty average for any USB drive nowadays.

One thing Seagate was smart about is that even with the 1TB drive being thicker than a normal FreeAgent Go drive, it still fits the regular dock without any trouble. Now only if they could make a specialty carrying case for it, then we’ll be set.

Seagate’s listing seems to be lacking the price of the 1TB model, but Best Buy has it for $190 right now, which is the best price we’ve seen so far.

Scores

Price: 8
- We would definitely pay more to carry around a terabyte wherever we go and it’s cheaper than WD’s portable 1TB version.

Setup/Install: 9
- Couldn’t be easier, but the included software might be an annoyance for some during first use.

Ease of Use: 9
- Even though it’s thicker and heavier, it’s still a portable drive and it travels with you quite nicely.

Performance: 8
- The drive isn’t all about performance, but it still contributes average speeds that we see from bus-powered drives.

Features: 8
- The simple fact that it’s a 1TB, bus-powered drive is great. The included software is nice once you use it, but like I mentioned before, some are just going to want to access the file system right away.

Overall: 8.5 Olives