Seagate FreeAgent Go review

The FreeAgent Go has obviously been taking styling tips from Seagate's desktop drive, the FreeAgent Pro (now discontinued), which we reviewed in the last external hard disks Labs. A familiar shade of metallic brown encases the 250GB portable drive, and there's the same orange light that pulses into life when the drive is activated.

It's one of the best-looking mobile drives on test but it's not the most versatile. The only interface available, for instance, like most of these portable drives, is mini-USB, and there's no DC input, so connection to devices that can't meet the power demands may be troublesome. Seagate does include a single mini-USB to dual-USB A cable, however, so it should work with the majority of laptops and PCs.

The Seagate is one of the more bulky drives in this group, measuring 98 x 122 x 17mm, but if weight is an issue it's the lightest (at a mere 178g) apart from the Freecom offering. The FreeAgent Go should offer your data more protection than the rubber shell offered with the XXS, too, thanks to its sturdier, more robust-feeling plastic case.

Performance was below average, however. In our suite of tests, the drive found itself placed firmly in the bottom half of the table in each of the write tests, and for the read tests it was well and truly last. The drive took a sluggish 6.6 seconds to read the 100MB collection of 1,000 files and 28 seconds to write our multiple file test.

It may look good, then, but there are few extras to differentiate the Seagate from any of the other portable drives here and the price is relatively high at 24.1p per gigabyte. That, and the poor performance, mean we can't recommend the FreeAgent this month.

Author: Mike Jennings