Home > Consumer Reviews > Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK

I was truly astonished by the bad experience I had with this particular drive. I picked up three of them intending to use them for backing up data and was truly shocked to discover two were confirmed DOA by Seagate Technical Support right out of the box.

Symptom: Drive only spins up when power and USB cable are attached. But Windows XP never detected two of the drives, installing them only as "Unknown device," despite more than a dozen attempts to reinstall.

Problem: "These drives are bad because the chipset is not responding properly with your computer." We tried several other machines here with the same results. Apparently hit or miss efforts to get the drive recognized by XP are also a result of a bad chipset, but people are apparently living with this, and they are living dangerously. Should the drive fail during a file write, your data integrity is at risk.

Symptom: The third drive was instantly recognized by Windows XP, but within 15 minutes as so many other reviewers have discovered, "delayed write failures" begin appearing as the drive overheats. A massively poor design by Seagate is responsible for this, with the primary ventilation being located underneath the drive stand, which is for all intents and purposes a distinct piece of plastic. No direct, short access to the drive itself is provided by the ventilation holes, which also don't seem to take into account that heat rises, not falls. Shortly after the delayed write failures began, the drive began making a loud whining sound.

Problem: The drive has overheated and its useful life is shortened by the presence of the whining sound, which would indicate something is hanging up inside the drive.

Seagate wants to RMA all three drives, but all of these failured occured within 24 hours of receipt of the drives, so no thanks. All three are going back for a refund and I'll look elsewhere.

I have to say this is the worst experience I've ever had in more than 20 years of buying computer components. There is simply no excuse to stock a product so poorly designed as to guarantee the shocking number of problem reports I've encountered on many review sites, all relating to the drive's incredibly inept design for dealing with heat-related matters, an inexcusably poor chipset implementation which does not guarantee instantly recognized connections to your computer, and, frankly, encountering for the first time multiple units (one from a different manufacturing lot) suffer a 100% failure rate within hours of receipt. What in the world was Seagate thinking?

Stay far, far away from this one. Look instead for products that offer either fan cooling or a more open design to deal with the heat issues newer generation hard drives have to contend with.

A five year product warranty means absolutely nothing if the integrity of your data is at peril, and it definitely is with this product.

Update 11/10/2007 - Replaced with Western Digital My Book units (picked up four total). These are working right out of the box and make a far better alternate choice, although the warranty (extendable to three years for $25 at Western Digital website) is only one year. Note that the older My Book model and newer v2.0 (green box) both work basically the same, but Western Digital has done away with the power switch on v2.0.

If your sole purpose is to offload archives, then this is a great product. Most people don't think twice of backing up their existing data. Also, each version of windows comes with a backup program which originated from the Veritas Brand of Software. You can easily set the Free Agent Hardware and make it an active drive, then setup the Backup Software within MS 2000, XP, or Vista.

I've read reviews that seem to point out the burden of USB2 write speed. It makes no difference if the interface is Firewire or USB if the intent is to just backup data. If it takes a few extra seconds or minutes, no big deal. Either way the data will get to the disk and you can rest peacefully.

Update as of September 02, 2007: It appears my drive has began failing. I've heard from various sources that this series of Drives lacks cooling capacity. I've left mine plugged in for a few hours to begin noticing Windows Cache errors reading and writing from the drive. If the drive is left to cool, it is fine when plugged in. This is a major problem and I am considering having the drive replaced. Also, I've used the Seagate tools and it failed to run the tools on the detected FreeAgent Drive. Weird? I'll say.

I bought this drive in July. A week ago the supplied power adapter burned out and fried the control board. WARNING! Seagate does NOT cover this at all! The only way they would accept a return is to send the entire unit. If I wanted my data, they offered an expensive data recovery service, not a drive replacement. There was NO option at all to replace the damaged components or even swap the drive to a new enclosure! I had to crack the case, remove the drive, and put it in a ($60) external enclosure myself. The drive was fine and I recovered all data. But the remains of the burned out unit are worthless. Seagate refused to replace the drive, even if I returned the entire pile of parts after copying the data to another drive...because I'd opened the case. What did they expect me to do? Pay them a fortune to "recover" my data when all that was needed was to move the returned drive into another case? "Sorry, we do not offer that service."
I call that appalling and unacceptable.
I have since replaced the power adapter on my other FreeAgent unit with a high-quality aftermarket adapter...again, at my own expense. Cost: $100 ($60 for the new enclosure, $20 for the new adapter) making this a $240 drive, not including my time. Still cheaper than their offered "data recovery" service which was quoted at $1400 minimum (yes, that's one thousand four hundred dollars)...plus shipping both ways, warranty not valid.
Thanks for nothing, Seagate!
UPDATE: The problem with the system not recognizing the drive, as noted in other reviews, is a fact. The only way I can get either of my machines (laptop and tower, different makers, different OSs) to see the drives is to power them down and back up each session. The one I removed and placed in a external container does not have this problem so it's the Seagate controller board at fault.

Pros: Quietest external hard drive I have seen and runs with very low vibration. I also have the Western Digital My Book Premium 500GB that is much louder and causes much more vibration on the desk and is warmer. Well designed case, including a thinner than normal USB cable, a 1 piece AC adapter that is about 1.5"x3" in size, and all cables plug neatly at the bottom of the base. Works as expected on a Mac. Uses perpendicular magnetic recording technology.

Cons: Limited to only a USB2 interface. This limits Sustained Read/Write speeds to roughly 18MB/sec whereas an external hard drive on Firewire would have Sustained Read/Write speeds of around 30MB/sec. There is a very hard to find and much more expensive Firewire version though.

As slick looking and relatively inexpensive ($128.00 CDN) this portable drive is, I cannot recommend this unit. I was immediately concerned about the plastic body because plastic is a very poor conductor of heat. There is a fan under the unit but it does not seem very effective.

After about one week, the unit began failing after about 15 GB of data writing to the unit. In the beginning, it would fail with a "Windows delayed write failed" which was followed by a "unknown USB device." The only solution was to shut my 500 GB Seagate FreeAgent off and wait a while. After powering it back on, I was able to use it again for a while.

As of last night, however, the unit is no longer recognized by my computer (or any other computer).

I am currently unsure if the hard drive is corrupted or if it is the FreeAgent's USB interface that has failed. I will do some more testing tonight.

I fully expect that it is inevitable that a hard drive will fail but two weeks? This is unacceptable!

- Added on Sept. 12, 2007
The reason why this drive fails is that it has a 7200 RPM drive inside a plastic case, trapped in a metal cage, without adequate ventilation. After a few tens of Gigabytes of continuous data transfer, the hard drive inside the Freeagent will likely exceed the manufacturers maximum recommended temperature.

It is a poorly designed chassis. I don't know what Seagate was thinking!

A better alternative is to purchase a Seagate 500GB SATA drive (because despite this flub, Seagate still makes the best hard drives and offers the best warrantees) and an external USB chassis with good ventilation (such as the Antec MX-1).