Back to School 2010: Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable External Hard Drive

I recently had the opportunity to test out the ultra portable Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB external hard drive. I was excited to get my hands on the FreeAgent Go as my old external drive is a beast. The idea of double my old drive's capacity at a mere 20% the size was enough to give me a geek coronary.

Before I get into the particulars, I want to pre-qualify myself as an expert. I have both my A+ and Network+ certifications and do supplemental teaching at an IT school. Sounds nerdy, doesn’t it? The point is I know how a hard drive should perform and what features a good one should have.

The moment you examine the package you can tell the Go 500 is sleek and a little sexy. It is about the size of a very thin men's wallet. When you open the package you see that two things are noticeably missing: an AC adapter and a power cord. Sounds like a bad thing, but this is one of the nicest features about the Go 500: It does not require external power! All you need to use the Go is a small USB cable (provided), that’s it! This hard drive is about as portable as you can make 500 gigabytes.


Laptops and netbooks have overwhelmingly replaced desktop computers as the students weapon of choice for their computing needs. With this portable revolution external storage needed to adapt and follow suit and the Go 500 has done so nicely. The Go 500 easily slides right in a small pocket in your laptop bag or sleeve. Not something an older external hard drive could do and certainly not one that requires external power.

As far as performance is concerned I was pleased. I was not able to perform any benchmarking, but I hardly needed to (or cared to). I need external storage for periodical back up and the Go 500 was as fast as I expected it to be. I copied the entire contents of my old external drive to the Go 500 in about an hour. Considering I transferred a few dozen gigabytes and my old drive uses the slow USB 1.0 standard, I thought it did well.

I love my FreeAgent Go 500 and I would recommend one to anybody in need to external storage. I would consider it mandatory for anybody who needs critical backup on the move like students and professionals. When you turn it on there are a few dozen little pin size lights that come on that let you know it is functioning, nice touch. The price per gigabyte is in tune with competing models, but few are as sleek and cool!

The FreeAgent Go portable hard drive is available in ten different colors and can range in capacity from 250Gb to 1TB. To learn more about this product, visit Seagate.com . You can order Seagate products right on the Seagate website or from other major retailers, such as Walmart, Staples, Target, Sears, and Tiger Direct.

Thank you to Seagate for sending us a sample product free of charge to base this review upon.