Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK

by Seagate

Product Details

• Item Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• ASIN: B000ND75C0
• Item model number: ST305004FDA1E1-RK
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (334 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 9, 2007

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description When its time to back up and protect your digital content--photos, music, documents, and more--it doesn't get much easier than the Seagate Free Agent Desktop USB Portable Hard Drive. Simply plug it in to any power source, connect the USB cable to any computer, and you're ready to go. This hip-looking hard drive takes up less room on your desk than an ordinary stapler, giving you more space for your other desktop items.

Powerful storage device with a sleek new design.

Takes up less room on your desk than a stapler.

Keep all your digital content in a safe and secure location.

Portable Performance and Security
If you're still relying on your personal computer or back-up CDs or DVDs to store your digital content or vital personal or family documents, you're running an unnecessary risk. Your computer can only hold so many files and can crash at any time, leaving you helpless to access your content. DVDs and CDs have a place in archiving, but they get easily scratched and lost. It's too risky to store everything in your computer, and too time-consuming and cumbersome to have a drawer full of CDs or DVDs.

Computers come and go, but your content should always be nearby. With up to 1000 glorious gigabytes, the Free Agent external hard drive is the best place to gather and access all of your important photos, movies, music, games and documents. Simply plug in the power and the USB cable and you’re ready to go.

The Seagate Free Agent is big enough to store a huge portion of your digital content in a safe and secure environment, but small enough to let you take that content with you wherever you go. In other words, having the Seagate Free Agent is like having your entire computer with you at all times, but in a package that's a small fraction of the space and weight of your computer.

Designed to live peacefully in your home or office, the Free Agent external hard drive is extra quiet and takes up less room on your desk than a stapler. Even the cable ports are base-mounted to help keep your desk free of clutter. We even add a little bit of sophistication to your desktop with the unique espresso brown finish and molten amber illumination.

The sleek and slim design of this hard drive--only measures 7.5 x 1.6 x 6.4-inches (H x D x W)--and a weight of less than four pounds. The Seagate Free Agent lets you transfer files seamlessly from your computer via its USB 2.0 connection at a brisk transfer rate of up to 480Mb/sec. The drive delivers a spindle speed of 7,200 RPM, giving you the high-speed performance you need to back your data up quickly and safely.

The Seagate Free Agent is ready to use out of the box with a PC, but it can be made Mac-ready in a matter of minutes with Mac OS X's Disk Utility. This portable hard drive is already compatible with Windows Vista (as well as Windows XP and Windows 2000), allowing you to backup your content regardless of operating system upgrades.

At this compact size, and with this high performance, you now have the ability to take your data with you anywhere you go, so your digital content finally has room to breathe. A five-year warranty is also included, giving you complete peace of mind.

What's in the Box
FreeAgent Desktop drive, USB 2.0 cable, AC power adapter, and quick start guide.

Product Description

Computers come and go, but your content should always be nearby. . The FreeAgent desktop drive is the best place to gather and access all of your important photos, movies, music, games and documents. Simply plug in the power and the USB cable and you're ready to go. Takes up less room on your desk than a stapler and to help eliminate the slightest bit of worry, we've even included a five-year limited warranty.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

224 of 233 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Astonishing Experience: Three Drives Purchased - Three Drives Failed, November 7, 2007

By 

Phillip M. Dampier (Rochester, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK (Personal Computers)

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.

169 of 178 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Archive Space Solution, May 21, 2007

By 

David Carlin (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK (Personal Computers)

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.

280 of 299 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Warning - warranty may not be valid!, August 30, 2007

By 

T. Smith (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK (Personal Computers)

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.