Home > Consumer Reviews > Seagate ST307504FDA1E1-RK FreeAgent Desktop 750 GB 3.5" USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

Works fast and seems to be reliable. Setup was very easy and it runs a lot cooler than my previous external drive. Personally, I like the power-saving spin-down feature, as it prevents the drive from spinning idly for days on end (as sometimes happened with my previous drive when I forgot to switch it off). The downside of this is that it doesn't have a power button that you can press to manually turn it off.

Obviously, it has the advertised size and connection options (750G/USB only). The included USB cable is a bit on the short side, and since it's a mini-USB connector on the drive side, it's not a simple matter of just swapping in any old USB cable you have lying around.

For another 50 bucks you can upgrade to Seagate's next tier of drives with additional eSATA Seagate ST307504FPA1E2-RK FreeAgent Pro 750 GB USB/eSATA External Hard Drive and Firewire Seagate ST307504FPA1E3-RK FreeAgent Pro 750 GB USB/eSATA/FireWire400 External Hard Drive connection options. Not worth the extra cost to me. I primarily use my external drive for full-disk backups of my two internal hard drives. Whether I'm getting 30MB/s over USB or 300MB/s over eSATA, it's still going to take a non-significant amount of time to backup an entire hard drive and then verify the backup image. Plus, right now my backup speed is gated by CPU for compression, so I doubt I'd see any difference at all.

Finally, for the aspect of this drive that I find really annoying and why I gave it a 3. When you Hibernate a Windows machine with the drive attached, it takes an extra 5-10 seconds to restart. At some point early in the boot process it blocks waiting for the drive to spin up. This can not be avoided without physically disconnecting either the USB or power cable. Using "Safely Remove Hardware" in Windows before hibernating doesn't make a difference - it still blocks the boot process (although the drive isn't available in Windows after resuming). A very annoying and unavoidable waste of time.

I have this one for more than 6 months now and am satisfied overall.
Perhaps, the important thing to note is that this works well with Linux. I'm using Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 and it worked out of the box. I didn't reformat the drive to ext3. Works fine in NTFS mode.

It's good to have plenty of space to store music and videos, take backups and throw whatever bulky trash that might be lying around on your laptop on this one. It devours it all... and doesn't burp. It has a built-in idle timer, which puts the drive to sleep, if it's not in use. This helps conserve power, as well as drive life. A welcome feature. Also, it has a cool yellow backlit strip in the front, which demands attention, esp if you keep your room dark. If you are accessing the drive, the yellow light alternately lights up and fades out, which is kinda cool. The power adapter is slim, which means you don't waste additional sockets on your power strip.

You do need to plug this one into a power socket to operate it. Just USB doesn't power it up, which is quite expected. It is not the quietest external drive I have seen. And don't expect this one to be ultra-portable either. If you are thinking of carrying this around in a suitcase, consider something else. The base, kinda makes it bulky and you don't want to be lugging the power adapter around anyways. I would say this is for your server/desktop at home. A mildly annoying (bug?) of this drive is its wake up time. It takes a good 10 seconds or more to wake up on a Linux system (should be similar on Windows), once it sleeps. But, I can live with it. It's not my primary drive after all.

For the price it wasn't bad.
The light bar is only visible from the right side, which is worthless if you have it to the right of you.
The drive takes about 5 sec to spin up, which is annoying on bootup (especially when you have a few of them) and annoying when you are accessing it. Not a huge deal, but dumb design.
Speaking of dumb design, they use a small usb connector - no clue why they didn't put in a full size B connector. Again, not a big deal, but you have to pack the cable if you take it somewhere because chances are, people won't have a mini usb cable.
Hope it lasts.
The esata versions of this drive are terrible, the reviews speak for themselves.

Seagate are by now well aware based on my (and others') many complaints that despite the advertisement suggesting this drive set (Free Agent USB) is Mac compatible, it fails the test regularly. The drive management software for Mac lacks the ability to control the interval before spin down - normally set at 15 minutes, this would not be a problem. However, it often: resets to 60 seconds (!) and resets to USB 1! There is no way to change the value unless you configure it using the PC version of Drive Manager (where the sleep timer setting exists). Otherwise, be prepared for awful sleep/wake activity and super slow transfer speeds. If you have Parallels or other virtual machine with Windows installed, using the PC drive manager seems to set the drive up OK - I have only had it switch back to flaky behavior a few times. The drive itself is very quiet (fanless) and under its regular operation seems to perform well. Buyer beware...

This seems to be a very good external HD. I have used it to store all of my important things from my computer in case my PC ever crashes. A good idea for everyone. Buy one.