500 Gigabytes of Naked Celebrity Photos!

You can store whatever you want on this Seagate 500 Gigabyte External Hardrive. My computer only has 120 gigabyte harddrive, which by today's standards is pretty small. It fills up fast.

What's in the Box?

500 gigabytes of naked celebrity photos are not included. You will have to troll spyware and spam infested sites to download those separately. The unit itself is nowhere near as sleek as my SimpleTech portable storage unit. It is a black hard plastic unit that looks like a thin rectangular block that sits on its end on a base. A large orange light runs up and down one edge so that you know it is up and running. It is about the size of a couple DVDs standing up on edge. Also included is backup software and drivers on th e hard drive, an easy to follow instruction manual, a USB 2.0 cable and an electric cord with power adapter. The adapter is on the plug end of it, to make it a big pain in the neck for you the consumer to find a spot to plug it in, since by doing so, you invariably block another plug on your power strip.

Set Up

Out of the box it took me less than ten minutes to get this up and running. Plug it in to the wall, then plug in the included USB 2.0 cable in to an available USB port on your computer. Run the software, and the drive is good to go. I transferred 30 gigabytes of assorted files ranging from MP3s, MPEGs, and JPEGs from my computer to the external hard drive to free up some space on my computer Harddrive. It took about half an hour to transfer 30 gigs of files. For any huge file transfer, I think you just need to set it up and then go do whatever it is you had planned for the day, and let it do its work.


What You Get - Speed

Transferring large amounts of files all at once seems to take a fair amount of time, even over a 2.0 USB connection. If you are looking to back up a large hard drive, it seems like it would take some time. I didn't buy it to back up my harddrive though, I wanted additional storage space that I could also move easily.

On individual files, the USB 2.0 connection works just fine. Songs play with no lag, movie files play with no lag, and documents load quickly and easily just as they would from your own internal hard drive. I had no problem with my screen filling with hundreds of thumbnails of a trip to Disney land a few years back that was on my hard drive and transfered to the Seagate. I know sometimes on Zip drives, it takes longer for photo thumbnails to load from the Zip drive than from the hard drive, at least the flash drive zips I have used.

The drive spins a bit faster than my old turntable. My Bang & Olufsen turntable (aka record player) could spin records at up to 78 rpm. The Seagate comes in at 7200 rpm.

What you get - Storage or
When is 500 Gibabytes NOT 500 gigabytes?

You actually get 465 gigabytes, even though the programs included on this are only a couple hundred megabytes. Perhaps it is the way file space is allocated, I don't know, someone more computer savvy may.

Reliability

I have only had this unit for a couple months, but I can certainly attest that the unit wasn't D.O.A., and to this point, I have had no problems.

Portability

Although this unit isn't as portable as the USB only Simple Tech drives, you could certainly use it to easily transport huge amounts of data by unplugging it and bringing it with you. The unit is only 4 pounds, and it would be very easy to unplug it and install it on another computer to transfer files. I still prefer the plugless SimpleTech drives for that however.

Value

I picked this up at my local OfficeMax for $139.00. That makes this drive about 33 cents a gigabyte of storage (true capacity 465 gigs / $139.00 = 33 cents). That is pretty cheap! For everything but video storage, this external hard drive will hold thousands of it, songs, photographs, documents. Even a number of videos could be backed up onto the Seagate. An average movie backed up with a product like DVD X will use 4.7 gigs, so you could even fit a hundred movies onto the Seagate!

Summary

If you are looking for simple easy and cheap storage space, the Seagate Free Agent 500 GB external hard drive may be just the thing for you! I am completely happy with mine.