My new External Drive: Seagate Free Agent Desk 1TB

Being connected to LAN, I download a lot. Watch and store movies. Back up my personal data a lot. So I got a 1TB External Drive yesterday. It’s a real beauty. I never though External Drive can look so sexy (don’t mind the language). I was so happy getting (buying) it that I wanted to blog about it. So I decided being a reviewer I can give a small review on it.

This will be my first hardware review. Please give you feedback so I can know if I did the review correctly or not. So coming to the topic, I bought Seagate Free Agent Desk 1TB External Drive. As I was saying before it’s a real beauty. I have never seen any hard drive even coming near it in the beauty section. Oh forget that, what we have to do with beauty. We must be really interested in the beast with in, the 1TB beast.

The External Drive I bought is not a portable one. It is a 3.5 inch External Drive. It’s a Desktop Hard Drive (That’s why it is called Free Agent Desk). The Free Agent Desk weighs 1kg without the power supply and 1.1kg with it included. You need external power to power it. This External Drive has support for USB 2.0 and has a Spindle speed of 7200 RPM. I had to pay Rs 7,200 (INR) for it, which is real low price (after paying all taxes). I have heard other drives cost more than Rs 10,000 (INR). Shopkeeper told me External Hard Drive from Maxtor were less costly but were out of stock. Well I didn’t have time to wait long and I very much love Seagate, so I bought it. Let’s talk about the Packaging Box. You see a picture of it in the right side. When I first saw the Box, I though it had 2 External Drives. I even asked the Shopkeeper if this was really one drive. When I unpacked I was very impressed to see how well it was packed with nice protection.

The product comes with four small rubber feet and a small plastic stand to either sit the unit on its base or side, but the stand doesn’t provide enough stability for the drive, which easily falls over if knocked slightly. That’s no problem for me as I will never use the side stand. There are 4 different types of pin which can be connected to adapter. These are for different types of AC sockets. You can see the picture of the External Drive and its accessories below. Accessories include 1 USB cable, 1 Adapter, 4 pins, Manual, 4 small rubber feet and side stand. The black thing which you can see in the picture is the protection. I took its photo as it was the part of packaging. The Hard Drive and accessories were well packed with in it.

I did a small test on my new External Hard Disk Drive. It was to check the copy/transfer speed. I transferred 1.45 GB of Data (A Movie file) from my Laptop Hard Drive to my New External Drive. It took some 1 min 35 sec for the transfer. This is nearly 15.62 MB/sec data transfer. This is a very good speed. I did not have any proper software for benchmarking it, so I searched on Google. I found the following information.

The Desk managed to average 30.6 megabytes per second in our read test, 27.19MBps in our write test and reached 15.14MBps in our copy/transfer benchmark.

The result above is very impressive. The above test was done using 20 GB data. You can ask any computer expert and he can tell how impressive these figures are. My small test also tallies with the above result. Well, well I almost forgot to share one more picture with you all. If you remember from above (I know you remember), I told you this External Drive is a beauty. I like its lights very much. It is not like other Drives which has just some blue light which is a sore to eye. This Drive has beautiful light. It reacts to the activity of dive. Dims when activity is less. It is even more beautiful in the dark. So I took a photo of it in dark. You can see below photo of the Drive in dark.

Note: The Drive lights look more beautiful with naked eye then in photos.

Now hardware cannot be all good. Yup its true nothing can be only good, so is with this Hard Disk. It’s not a big fault, but this Hard Drive only has USB 2.0. I would have liked to have an eSATA port as well. eSATA’s data transfer is very fast.

So the conclusion is I got one of the best External Drive at a low cost. A combo of Beauty and Beast. If anyone is willing to have a Desktop External Hard Drive he can give this baby a try.

The cost varies from countries to countries. Some where I saw price tag of 138$-168$. I think Amazon has the lowest Price. Check Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive ST310005FDA2E1-RK (Silver) priced at 119.99 $ only.