Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB

The ‘FreeAgent' brand is used by all of Seagate's external hard drives and recently, the company refreshed the lineup with a set of brand new models. Our FreeAgent Go 500Gbyte test sample is one of the new releases and differs from its predecessor on a number of levels.

Visually, the new drive looks very sleek thanks to its very slim dimensions and white and silver finish. It's a marked improvement over its predecessor and just screams modern right from the off, whereas the older drives looked somewhat dated. Like the older FreeAgent models, status lights are present and signify when the drive is performing data transfers by pulsing (the light remains solid when no data transfers are taking place).

On the inside, Seagate has used a new 2.5-inch hard drive and, thanks to its increased areal density, the new FreeAgent Go line tops out at a massive 500Gbytes of storage capacity. This is very impressive given that just a few months ago, you'd be forced to opt for a standard, wall-socket powered portable drive if you wanted a capacity such as this.

In terms of performance the Go is reasonably quick; it ran neck and neck with most of the portable USB drives we tested. While this is good, we expected slightly better results given that the drive uses storage platters that are denser than its competitors in terms of capacity (higher density generally gives quicker read/write speeds).