These are the take-it-all-with-you days. For example, if you're going on a long business trip, you don't want to leave your videos home -- after a long day of meetings, you may need your copy of Iron Man.
The Seagate FreeAgent Go is one of a new family of portable hard drives that can alleviate that situation. It offers backup for its intended market of consumers -- and tries to make both the drive and the backup process as painless and even attractive as possible.
![](http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/default/themes/cw_blogs/cache/files/u128/SeagateGo.jpg)
The current drive is an update of the FreeAgent Go that was introduced in 2007; while the previous drive had a capacity of 80GB, the current FreeAgent is available in three flavors: 250GB ($120), 320GB ($150), and 500GB ($200). Besides this impressive increase in capacity, the new version has had a fashion makeover: it now comes in blue, black, silver, and red, with a triangular pattern of lights that flash when the drive is connect.
The drive connects to your system via a single USB 2.0 connection. If you decide to kick in another $30 for the optional docking station, you'll need two USB connections -- apparently, the base plus the drive needs to pull more power.
In the initial backup, which scanned the My Documents and several other folders, I logged 1.3GB (5744 files) in about 105 minutes (using a somewhat old Sony VAIO VGN-S360 that held a 1.70GHz Intel Pentium M and 512MB of RAM -- as usual, your mileage may vary). Subsequent updates were, as expected, only a few minutes.
The backup software is simple, stable, and works nicely -- even the most technophobe consumers are unlikely to need to resort to any kind of documentation in order to work it. It also recovered nicely when, during an initial backup, I managed to accidentally disconnect the drive from a laptop.
This is not the drive to get if you want a really thorough backup -- it doesn't have the software (or the capacity) to ghost a reasonably substantial hard drive. But for a quick backup of documents and media files, and as a way to carry your data along with you, you could do a lot worse.
The Seagate FreeAgent Go is one of a new family of portable hard drives that can alleviate that situation. It offers backup for its intended market of consumers -- and tries to make both the drive and the backup process as painless and even attractive as possible.
![](http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/default/themes/cw_blogs/cache/files/u128/SeagateGo.jpg)
The current drive is an update of the FreeAgent Go that was introduced in 2007; while the previous drive had a capacity of 80GB, the current FreeAgent is available in three flavors: 250GB ($120), 320GB ($150), and 500GB ($200). Besides this impressive increase in capacity, the new version has had a fashion makeover: it now comes in blue, black, silver, and red, with a triangular pattern of lights that flash when the drive is connect.
The drive connects to your system via a single USB 2.0 connection. If you decide to kick in another $30 for the optional docking station, you'll need two USB connections -- apparently, the base plus the drive needs to pull more power.
In the initial backup, which scanned the My Documents and several other folders, I logged 1.3GB (5744 files) in about 105 minutes (using a somewhat old Sony VAIO VGN-S360 that held a 1.70GHz Intel Pentium M and 512MB of RAM -- as usual, your mileage may vary). Subsequent updates were, as expected, only a few minutes.
The backup software is simple, stable, and works nicely -- even the most technophobe consumers are unlikely to need to resort to any kind of documentation in order to work it. It also recovered nicely when, during an initial backup, I managed to accidentally disconnect the drive from a laptop.
This is not the drive to get if you want a really thorough backup -- it doesn't have the software (or the capacity) to ghost a reasonably substantial hard drive. But for a quick backup of documents and media files, and as a way to carry your data along with you, you could do a lot worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment