Seagate FreeAgent Desk

Seagate originally released the FreeAgent line of external hard drives back in 2007 and recently updated the lineup with the FreeAgent Desk standing as a desk-based data backup and storage solution.

The difference between the old and new line of FreeAgents is visible internally as well as externally. Whereas older FreeAgents adopted an orange and dark brown finish, the new line adopts white and silver as its primary colours. As a result, the new FreeAgent models look very much like, dare we say it, Apple products. Overall, the team preferred the older look slightly more. Another niggle is that whereas the older drive had a dedicated power button to switch the drive on or off, the new Desk doesn’t.

Our test sample offered a massive 1.5Tbytes of hard disk space and putting the Seagate through our HDTach3 benchmark, the drive returned average and burst speed results of 32.9Mbytes/sec and 34Mbytes/sec. Moving to real world testing, it took two minutes and 50 seconds to transfer 3.98Gbytes of data from our test PC to the FreeAgent and finished the job two seconds quicker, when it came to copying the same data back to the PC. A decent performance overall that outperforms its predecessor by some margin. The Desk was also faster than Western Digital’s MyBook USB drive in this test.

The drive ships with Seagate’s Manager software and this allows you to backup and restore data, sync data with your machine’s hard drive and encrypt data. All-in-all the software is easy-to-use and comprehensive in its abilities making it great for novice users as well as experts.