Customer Reviews

Seagate FreeAgent 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST310005FDA1E1-RK

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I've had this for about 3 weeks now* because I wanted yet another backup for my family pictures and some of the more interesting videos (I always back up the stuff that I really care about on several drives kept reasonably apart from each other). I can't think of any major issues and the only minor ones are the orange light that glows every time the disk is accessed - yes, we know, data is being read or written to the disk by the computer - and the external power supply.

Overall impressions: easy to install. I just plugged it in and... that was it on my Windows machine. The unit comes with some backup software but I like to be in control myself so I can't say that I bothered testing it. It's good to know it's there though. The size is reasonable - not the smallest external hard drive you can think of but it's not enormous either.

Oh, and the price is great. In fact, my only regret is not buying it from Amazon because, it turns out, I paid too much for it elsewhere back then. It's also possible that the price went down since I ordered it.

To conclude: if you have a relatively large amount of data to back up, or if you want to store pictures AND some videos, then this is what you need. If all you need is to back up your 10,000 pictures family album, you can get away with a smaller drive but, given the price... why would you not buy this one? I am sure, it will be viewed as a 'relatively small drive' 5 years from now but, until then, all the data that you need keeping will be backed up.

Oh, I forgot, you get a 'free' USB 2.0 wire in the box.

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*(Oct. 9, 2008) - While my experience with this product continues to be positive, I suggest that you read the other not-so-positive reviews before deciding whether you should purchase this unit or not. Also, I left a note to this review which describes how I am using this drive.

Had I written a review 6 months ago, I would have given this product 5 stars. Ease of use and huge storage for a decent price. Now I would rate this product very poorly, because the device is no longer operable, I've lost hundreds of gigs worth of information, and the warranty, frankly, is a pain in the butt.

I didn't use the device very often, so overheating wasn't an issue. All of a sudden, this beeping sound kept going off, and the device was no longer detected on any computers. Warranty is for 5 years (hah!), and if you want your data, you have to be willing to cough up the money. If you open the casing at all in an attempt to rectify, warranty is voided. Plus, the warranty means you can get a refurbished device, not a new one! The new one has already failed on me within 6 months; I'm thinking the refurbished one will last me another few months. Plus, the shipping requirements make returning your defective device more burdensome than necessary.

As to the design of the unit, it's cumbersome and ill-executed. Slim, but tall and easy to knock over, which I bet would kill the drives. I didn't do anything to mine, and already, it's dead. All in all, I can understand the good reviews, but give it a few months. I think many of the bad reviews come from users who have used it for a good duration, only to find out that the device has suddenly stopped working altogether.

I have been a PC nut since the Apple II and original IBM PC, and backup technology is just now getting good for us small office and home users. I have tried tape backup units, DVDs, and other classic solutions, never with real confidence that my data was stored safely. This 1TB HDD from Seagate really is a superb backup unit. On the competent advice of my IT professional, I bought two of these, one for my business, one for my home office.

The unit is very nicely built, with an attractive black finish and it stands vertically. It has a large orange vertical LED the brightness of which indicates whether the unit is working or on standby. The unit is very compact. If you need more than one later, you can stand them next to one another without taking up much space. But 1TB is enough storage for a LOT of files. Of course, in a year or two no doubt there will be units of the same physical size that store multiple terabytes. Nevertheless, for now, 1TB is a lot!

The unit installed effortlessly. You simply plug it into the power supply, and attach the USB (or firewire) connector to the computer. On my Vista Premium Home Edition machine, a menu came right up asking me if I wanted to install the backup software with which the unit comes equipped. I let it do so, and in a minute or so the software was installed and the 1TB HDD was shown in my Computer directory as ready to go. No need for reading anything; true plug and play. The unit is quiet and unobtrusive; it just does its job without annoying the user in any way. Nice!

I did install the backup software, and it seems to be very nice. In fact, this is the first time in years that I have seen backup software that I thought was better than just doing the backups manually. One complaint (minor) is that the backup software makes you specify each directory on a drive by checking a box. I would prefer an option that just lets me back up an entire drive. No big deal. The software enabled me to schedule a nightly backup every night, and that is an absolute first for me for my home office. A very nice feeling to know that one has one's files safely backed up. And one can easily view the contents of the unit to actually see the backed-up files.

This is a USB2 unit, so transfer speeds are not as fast as a SCSI drive would be, but usually this is not an issue with the type of use I plan, as routine backups and storage in increments does not take long. It did take roughly 1 hour twenty-five minutes to move about 34 GB of photo files from my little USB HDD to this unit; that is one USB2 unit to another, so it was bound not to be real speedy.

Incidentally, the unit is formated NTFS, so no need to reformat it to get rid of FAT32 format as is the case with some drives. It truly was ready to go for my Vista system.

So far I am extremely pleased with this unit. It is a fast, well-built, well-designed and cost-effective solution to mass storage of data.

I purchased this drive about 6 months ago. A couple weeks ago I noticed that my time machine backups were failing. The hard drive had died and I sent it in for repair and restore under my warranty. I received a phone call this morning that in a "very rare" occurance, it would cost $1900 to rebuild my hard drive. Somewhat "luckilly" for me ONLY my entire 5,000+ song iTunes library has been lost.

It taught me to have multiple backups of everything. I would never recommend this product to anyone.

I've had this drive for 2 weeks now. It's got ALOT of storage. It's fast enough for copying large amounts of files. It's not incredibly fast, but I don't know how fast you can expect a 1TB to be. The warranty is backed by Seagate, so I am not too worried about it dying on me. I've only ever owned Seagate drives and never had any problems. I got this for a great deal, and am loving it. For every negative, there's a positive to go with it!

Bought this and a 750 Gb version about the same time and used them flawlesslessly on my Sony Vaio laptop. I then moved them to my emachines PC and they froze my computer up and the drives became corrupted. I could reformat (yay, hours of work gone), and get it to work again with my Sony laptop. I tried it on a Toshiba laptop...same problem with the emachines PC....froze up, drive became corrupted, had to be reformatted. This all take place with repeated returns to Seagate and hours on the phone with their tech support as well before i finally realized it was a compatability issue with 2 of my 4 computers. I am now using these as backup storage/archiving only with my Dell PC, on which I have had no problems like with the Sony Vaio. So it appears to be a 50% success/failure rate for me. The Dell has Vista and the other three had Windows XP, so the OS doesn't seem to be the culprit. Have had other seagates up to 500 Gb capacity previously purchased that are working to this day, but I have switched over to Western Digital after this mess. Seagate techs were very helpful, but ultimately a LOT of my time was wasted on the phone, and sending HDs back and forth to Seagate for repairs that apparently didn't work. The one fix I haven't tried yet is to disable the orange pulsing access light--supposedly this fixes the problem in some cases, but I have given up at this point and will just use it with the Dell...it may be that the size of the drive is too much for the two computers to handle...and I also did try partitioning them to see if that would help, but it did not. Talking with people at an electronics store, I was told that they got a lot of complaints about the Seagates...as others have said, when they work, the work great. And I must say I am impressed with the 5-year warranty these things have, but I am thinking that may put Seagate out of business!

I purchased this USB external hard drive a few weeks ago, and it works just fine. Very pleased with the value for money. I did not try the automatic backup software, so cannot vouch for that. Works great as a file repository, transfer speed is quick and no glitches yet. One thing purchaser may need to know that is not clear in product description: your effective space is only 931GB, not 1000GB (or even 1024GB) as you might expect on a "1TB" drive. I believe this is a limitation of the file system, not the seagate hardware, and will be true of any 1TB drive you might purchase.

** UPDATE ** As-of 10-May-2011 .... more than two years after purchase => Still functioning without any trouble. Would still rate it 5 stars today ... now I'm looking for a 2TB external drive (data always fills up space, no matter now much you have!)

After reading so many positive reviews I was excited to receive my drive and hook it up. However, after having it screw up, become unmountable now for the second time, meaning I must erase everything on the drive, I am not so excited....

I am returning it, and will hope it was just a lemon, and the new one will work fine. However, my biggest beef is the absolutely horrible lack of decent customer service I've experienced, endured more specifically. I've had constant issues with being able to even login to their website, or forum, and I've had their tech support people be extremely rude, even to the point of simply disconnecting me in mid-call. And no, I'm not a screamer or vitriolic belittler of customer service people, as I fully understand a product's problems are not caused by their answering of the company's telephones.

I have seen an unsettling rise in tech people choosing to bail out of calls, rather than spending adequate time dealing with a more complicated issue, or risk their record by referring my call to a higher up, more knowledgeable layer of technician. This is very poor business, as it only results in customers, as myself, dropping that company off the list of those who'll get any future business from me, and any I may speak to.....

Mine died after a couple of months but really it was only about 10 uses.... probably not up and running for more than an hour or two total. Got all data on it, turned it off and put it away. Couple of months later plugged it back in.... won't load up, not recognized, failed the SeaTools diagnostics miserably. Went from working to nothing without even being turned on. Had a friend that I suggested this drive too as well, her's also died after loading everything on it after a very short life span. These drives are awful. I can get it repaired under warranty but I don't trust this drive anymore. Maybe I'll use it as a backup of a backup but I already replaced this 1TB drive with a western digital. Sending it back to seagate will result in them sending me a refurb and no data recovery. Search google and you'll find story after story like this for the freeagent drives. Buyer beware.

Most of the positive reviews I've read were from those who only had this drive for a short period of time. This is a data storage device, which is something you'd assume could be used for a significant period of time. How untrue. I bought the device a year ago to take the overflow of projects that I work on that range from videos to websites. Several weeks ago the device ceased showing up in my Finder. Attempts to use alternate USB cables and other computers yielded no results. I've backed up 2 years worth of contracts, source files, music and photographs on this device, all of which are now inaccessible.

Seagate markets this device with the tagline: "When you can't afford to lose anything, you need a drive that can handle everything". I couldn't afford to lose any of this data, I needed a device that I could store it on. The Seagate FreeAgent 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive was not that drive.

Because it does not function, it did not do what it claimed it could, I give it a 1 star rating.