Blognoscenti – Official Blog of WebAntics.co.za

Posts Tagged ‘Free Agent’

You are probably already familiar with Seagate’s FreeAgent Go external hard drive lineup. It’s been their line of portable storage for several years now. However, they’ve recently made some updates and introducted the “FreeAgent GoFlex” but we’re not only talking about a new, updated look to these drives. Seagate has completely overhauled the new lineup and really changed the way we connect external storage to computers with the GoFlex bunch.  

The new look has the curved edges which makes it look more updated. The main feature however of these new drives is that you can use different interfaces with the same drive, such as USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA. All you have to do is switch out the proprietary transfer cable that connects to the drive via a SATA connection. A USB 2.0 cable comes with the GoFlex drive, but if you want to use USB 3.0, FireWire, or eSATA, you can purchase these proprietary cables known as “Upgrade Adaptor cables.” Prices are on these are also pretty fair and reasonable.

For Mac users, it hasn’t been a good time lately to invest in a portable USB External hard drive because of Apple’s decision to drop Firewire ports on many of their notebooks, and they’re also yet to adopt the USB 3.0 standard so that leaves Apple users stuck using aging and slow USB 2.0 hardware. So this is another reason why we would recommend Seagate’s new FreeAgent GoFlex External Hard Drive line because you would then just buy one of these drives and you can use USB 2.0 or Firewire for now, then upgrade to USB 3.0 read/write speeds when Apple finally starts installing the hardware in their Macs. The FlexGo line even comes with an interesting NTFS driver specifically for Mac users, which allows it to be used as a Windows-formatted NTFS drive in OS X without reformatting it.

So altogether the new changes gets a thumbs-up from us. The trade-off here however is the somewhat higher price of the drives. The 5400RPM drives come in capacities of 320GB (R805.77), 500GB (R1007.55), 750GB (R1454.25), and 1TB (R1792.15), while the 7200rpm drives comes in at 500GB (R1236.24) and 750GB (R1662.19). The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex UltraPortable External Hard Drives are now available from WebAntics Online.