When I got paid for my first freelance job online, I had decided to buy a Hard Disk. It was in the March of 2009. My Home PC had a 40GB Hard Disk then. 40GB would get filled up like this, but it was pretty much OK then.
Well, a external storage stayed on my wish-list for a while and then when I bought a Dell Studio Laptop with a whooping 320 GB HDD, I was pretty much satisfied.
I was wrong.
Within 4 months, I was wondering, what did I do with the 320 GB? Thanks to the night unlimited internet and 8GB Pen Drive, it got filled up pretty easily.
To address this need, I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Desk I Tera Byte External Hard Disk Drive. Paid 4680 INR/- including taxes.
I had decided upon buying a 1 TB Internal HDD and a casing to use it as an external. In fact, I had placed an order last week. I posted it on facebook and twitter and soon people started saying that it costs as much as an external Drive, so why not get an external?
(Very luckily the order I placed was misplaced, so I got the change the order, as luck would have it! I read the signs!)
OK, here is the math.
Internal 1 TB, 7200 r.p.m HDD (Western Digital or Samsung) – Rs 3200
Casing for 1 TB HDD – Rs 1000
Total – Rs 4200 (plus taxes)
Seagate FreeAgent (the one I bought) – Rs 4400 (excluding taxes)
Both these Hard Disks needs external power. The model without external power costs around 8500. Who would want to carry around 1 TB of data anyway? Buy a 250 GB instead.
So if you are buying only once, the Seagate is a better option. It comes with 5 year warranty too. But 1 TB would run out of space one day and if you have plans to purchase another 1 TB and if you dont mind the looks, but a HDD + Casing. You dont have to buy Casing next time, so it would cost only Rs. 3200.
I am not crazy about storing all the movies and music and I think I can go with this 1 TB for at-least a year, plus I would be moving around a bit, so I decided to go for the Seagate thingy.
First Impressions
Seagate FreeAgent Desk comes with power cable, USB cable (not eSata), and 4 power plug adapters to choose depending on your location. I liked the power-plug design, I haven’t seen one like that before. Build quality and finishing of the product is great.
Once I plugged in the thing to USB (after plugging in power of course), the installer popped up, installed the thing. I am getting transfer speeds upto 55 MB/sec and about 24 MB/sec on average. I disconnected the HDD and connected it again, Vista shows it just as another drive along with the other hard disks.
So far so good
Unboxing Seagate FreeAgent
Here are some shots:
The LED display on the front panel looks great in the dark. While the transter is in progress it dims to about 20% and then lights up – a nice visual treat!
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