Seagate has always been a major leader in the storage industry, and particularly in my book due to their excellent warranty on hard drives. Depending on when you purchased your particular Seagate product, they offer 1 to 5 years of support coverage. Today, we take a look at a backup solution for on the go: the new Seagate FreeAgent Go.

The Seagate FreeAgent Go is part of the new FreeAgent line of external storage products that come with automatic backup and Ceedo software built-in. The FreeAgent Go in particular is a USB-powered device, so you don’t have to plug in a power brick (or as others call it, a wallwart). The Go is available in 3 different capacities as well, 80GB, 120GB, and the 160GB we’ll be reviewing today. Unfortunately for us Mac users, the Ceedo software is Windows-only. A quick format in Disk Utility puts the drive back in use on your Mac.

The FreeAgent Go has some of the nicest packaging I’ve seen in a product: simple, easy to understand, and nicely designed. Inside the box, you’ll find the hard drive, a USB cable, and setup guide. You may be thinking that it’s just a standard USB cable like the one for your digital camera, but it’s a Y-cable. If your computer doesn’t provide enough power, simply plug in the other end, labeled ‘Power Only’.

I plugged the Go into two Macs, a PowerBook G4 and a MacBook - oddly enough the former required the extra cable and not the latter. I think this was because I used a powered USB hub with the MacBook instead. When the Go is in need of more power, it is very easy to tell. During testing, the device made a slight ticking noise that sounded almost like a drive failure. USB cable to the rescue!

It took around 3-5 seconds to transfer a 50MB file to and from the device to both notebooks using USB 2.0.

I didn’t get a chance to try the Ceedo software, but what it allows you to do is similar to the U3 technology used on SanDisk thumb drives. You can run your applications straight off of the drive with all of your data kept with you, wherever you may be.

Overall, the FreeAgent Go is an excellent companion to your notebook computer when on the go. I personally have a weekly image of my laptop’s hard drive on the Go so that if something fails, I can quickly return to a working state without much lost data. Be sure to check out the rest of the FreeAgent line at Seagate’s website.

Pros

• Portable.
• Easy to use (hey, it’s a hard drive!)
• Ceedo software for Windows allows you to run apps off the drive.

Cons

• Ceedo is Windows-only, for now at least.

Final Verdict
5 out of 5 stars.

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