Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK
by SEAGATE
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK
Customer Review: I am extremely disappointed in this hard drive
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought a Seagate because they're supposed to be reliable, but have never had such a bad experience. I used the drive as my back-up and as storage for all of my photos and some of my applications. After just two months, the drive comes up as unreadable. The Seagate website is extremely difficult to navigate, so that it's frustrating to find basic information such as which of the many numbers on the drive is the serial number and which is the model number and which is something else altogether - and if you don't enter these correctly, no help for you. Do you have free tech support? You can't get to that info either. I finally got someone on live chat who told me, very flippantly, that my drive wasn't partitioned properly and so my data is probably gone. Why would this suddenly happen? I did no partitioning or non-partitioning. His only remedy was to tell me to download the Seagate restore data demo which will, supposedly, tell me if any of my data is recoverable. Even if it is, anything over 64 KB - which is NOTHING - can only be recovered by buying their $129 recovery software. The directions for the demo are geared to a software engineer level, and the demo itself has been scanning my drive for the last 8 hours and isn't even halfway through. When, after a faulty phone tree routed me back and forth endlessly, I got someone on the phone from data recovery and told them about the time it's taking, her response was, "Yeah, I heard it's slow." I also told her that her department can't be reached through the phone tree and she wasn't interested in hearing about it. Now I have learned, on Friday night, that they're closed all weekend. I find this unforgivable. They sell you a drive that dumps your data and then they want to charge a good chunk of change to recover it for you. And the service all along the way is as unhelpful as possible. I will never buy a Seagate product again.Customer Review: Warning - warranty may not be valid!
Summary: 1 Stars
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.
Customer Review: FreeAgent Desktop 500 USB External Hard Drive
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this drive when I started to unexpectedly run out of hard drive space on my Macintosh Powerbook laptop computer.
My laptop has served my needs very well, but when I purchased a 180 GB iPod, is started running out of hard drive space on my Mac. I therefore purchased this hard drive for the sole purpose of giving me the storage space that I needed to allow me to continue to convert and to store my CD collection for syncing to my iPod.
This drive was the first USB external hard drive that I have ever purchased. (As a Mac user, I have always preferred FireWire external components.) I find myself very pleased and very much liking this component for a number of reasons.
First, it was cost effective.
Second, there is more storage capacity than I require to store all of my CD collection conversions.
Third, it's sleek and doesn't require a lot of "real estate."
Fourth, because of the software that comes with the drive and the abundance of storage space, I will be backing up the entire contents of my laptop's built-in hard drive.
Fifth, I like Seagate hard drives because of their reliability and relatively long warranties.
When I first set this device up, I was surprised to find that there was NO external power switch of any kind. Instead, the device is powered up when it is plugged in the USB port of a computer. If you keep it plugged into a computer, it will power down when the computer is turned off and vice versa.
The only negative is that file access is a little slow, but I have nothing with which to compare it, except the hard drive that is built into my laptop.
All in all, this is an excellent product and a good choice for solving my particular problem....
Customer Review: Gets The Job Done
Summary: 4 Stars
In the past, I have backed up my data files on a second hard drive in my PC and relied on the ghost disk that came with my PC in case I had to reload the Windows operating system. This strategy has worked fine as I have had the need to reload Windows over the last several years. However, it is time consuming and meant that my only copy of my data files was inside my PC. As major manufacturers have begun to make relatively inexpensive external hard drives, I decided the time was right to improve my back up process.
I did some research on the WEB and learned that the Seagate FreeAgent seemed to be highly regarded--and the pricing was similar to solutions from other major suppliers. I estimated the size of 500GB to be adequate for my purposes--although I now wonder if I should have sprung for the 750GB. While there were other interfaces available and I have firewire ports, I decided that USB2 would be adequate.
I have been using the hard drive for about a month and it performs as I had expected. I use it to back up my data files (Second Copy software) and ocassionally to back up the operating system (Vista Ultimate back up). Because of a software problem, I recently had to reload Vista and it went efficiently--validating my process. I also used it to copy files from am old PC to load to my new PC and it went flawlessly.
Speed is adequate for my purposes--although the lighting could be improved to increase visability. Not a big deal for me as I usually go elsewhere when doing back ups, but a disadvantage for those who need to monitor activity by watching the drive light.
Long time reliability is the only unknown but the relatively long warrenty time period gives me some confort that I will be using this hardware happily for quite a while.
Customer Review: Worked for one week!
Summary: 1 Stars
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).