Seagate FreeAgent Go
June 2007Seagate, a maker of hard disc drives, recently introduced a line of external backup drives for PCs. With PC users storing vast amounts of pictures, music and videos (not to mention those pesky work files) on their computers, the need for additional storage has never been greater. Let’s face it, PC’s haven’t made any great leaps in reliability lately, so drive crashes, data corruptions and accidental deletions are as common, and frustration as ever.
The FreeAgent GO is the most portable of the new FreeAgent drives. Not much bigger than a man’s wallet, the version I tried was a 160 GB model. It’s the picture of simplicity. There’s only one port (USB 2.0) and a “Y” shaped USB cable (one USB terminal on one end, two on the other) so you can hook it to two USB jacks at the same time. Hooking it to two jacks is recommended because on some computers a single jack may not be able to deliver enough power to run the drive. The device glows orange when it’s connected.
Once connected you’re asked to launch the Ceedo suite of applications. Ceedo is great because it creates a virtual desktop environment on the drive allowing you easy access to your files, organized into a document folders just as your Windows desktop does (My Pictures, My Music, My Documents). You can also save all your web and Outlook preferences on the drive so your online life stays the same no matter what computer you use. To get started I moved about 20GBs of music and pictures onto the drive. An easy sync application ensures that the drive contents stay current as you ad files to the PC. I then took the drive to another computer and easily accessed those files and added more. System crash be damned, my files were safe. Unfortunately the FreeAgent GO is useless for Mac users.
$159
www.seagate.com
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