Seagate FreeAgent Go 640GB

Full Review

Keeping a backup on a slim external drive, or moving large quantities of data around is not rare anymore. High-capacity slim portable drives thus become necessary. Seagate enters this party of plenty with its FreeAgent Go 640 GB drive. It is available in multiple colors and designed in the same form factor as previous drives from the Seagate FreeAgent Go series. It manages to remain slim despite using three platters to attain a capacity of 640GB, inside the pre-moulded casing that houses a 2.5-inch laptop-style hard disk. Thankfully finger-prints are not an issue here since the casing is not of the glossy type.

It connects over a single USB cable (to a PC/laptop/media player) without requiring additional power cables. The bundled software includes a simple application to create home movies (named “muvee”) and functionality for automated backup/synchronization (Seagate Manager). Besides this, the package contents of this drive are not very different from others – fairly spartan and not too extravagant. This software is Windows-only of course, though the drive can be used with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS as well. Internally, it uses a Seagate 2.5-inch hard disk spinning at 5400rpm with an 8MB buffer. This product carries a warranty of 3 years.

During tests, its data transfer speeds were as expected. Keep in mind that external storage devices are currently bottle-necked by the USB 2.0 interface itself and the performance of almost all USB hard drives is at par when using Windows 7 which uses caching methods to improve user experience. In synthetic benchmarks, it gave a read speed average of 31.1 MB/s and a write speed average of 24.6 MB/s. The read access time averaged 17.48 ms. On the PC Mark 05 HDD test suite, this drive scored 2855. Real-world write tests consisted of copying a number of small files (1.81 GB , 31 files of varying sizes), and one single large file (over 2 GB in size), from a fast desktop hard drive to the portable drive under testing. Speeds here averaged 20.4 MB/s and 24.2 MB/s respectively. Real-world read speed (copying multiple files from portable drive to desktop HDD) stood at 27.2 MB/s.

All through testing, the drive barely got warm to the touch. With Seagate's scale and penetration of product categories, you might get some extra reasons to buy this drive. You can use a FreeAgent Go drive with a hard drive dock for convenience, or with a "Theater+" HD media player to store movies. In both cases, the manufacturer is Seagate themselves, so they can tailor their products to exist in harmony and benefit the sales of other Seagate products. For reasons we have already explained in reviews of other storage drives, the available storage space will be lesser than the manufacturer’s quoted number. For example, a 320GB hard disk will offer usable space of 298GB approximately. With this Seagate drive, the available formatted capacity is 596 GB. This product carries a warranty of 3 years.

Bottom Line

On balance, we can only say this drive is a normal one. But the design looks sleek and the bundled software is a value-add. These factors tip the scale in its favour for someone looking to buy an external drive that offers plenty of data storage capacity, yet looks good and small. The price of Rs. 7,000 is along expected lines since this is not targeted at the lower-end of the market.