Seagate FreeAgent Go (160GB)

Summary: I was impressed from the moment I saw it on the shelf at Best Buy ($119). The box was small, trendy looking... and light. When I opened it, the first (and only) thing I saw were the words "This won't take long." in large print on the cover of the very short user manual. The box had minimal packaging and only contained the drive and the usb cord, both in wrappers closed with stickers proclaiming "hello". Seagate clearly has a grade A marketing team, and I felt happy and giddy to try it out.

The drive is very small... while larger than a cell phone, I was able to slide it into the back pocket of my jeans and walk comfortably, although it does stick out a little and I wouldn't want to sit down. It is also fairly light, feels solid, and only has one single tiny mini-usb port. The drive is a dark chocolate brown, and the only marking on its exterior is the orange logo, and a very small and minimized serial number / logo bar on the back. One entire side of the drive (the one opposite the mini-usb drive) is dark, but when you attach it to a machine it glows orange (it increases/decreases in brightness as it runs to show current usage). While the light is really kinda useless, it is neat (you can turn it off from the tools).

The usb cord is a short Y cable (about 24 in), with the mini-usb on one end to plug into the drive and two regular usb's on the other. I like that the cord isn't longer, as I would just complain about dragging around a long bulky cord. The drive has no buttons or switches... it is just a sealed box with one mini-usb port... so no access to it is necessary and you can place it anywhere.

The "Y" in the cord is closer to the mini-usb side (about 9 in off), so at full seperation you can get the two regular usb ends about 30 inches apart... more than enough to plug into opposite sides of a machine. The cord for one of the two regular usbs is thicker than the other (this is obviously the data cord vs the thinner extra power cord).

The drive is virtually silent... I had to hold it up to my ear to see if it made any noise at all. It barely vibrates whatsoever, and it gets maybe 5 degrees hotter than room temperature, max.

I am 100% happy with the drives exterior... it is everything it should be: small, sleek, simple, and light. Seagates product management and marketing teams get A+++.

The software didn't fare as well. There are very few options... only allowing you to select folders to synch and turn on/off auto synching, turn on/off the exterior light, and set the sleep interval. The synching option allows you to synch My Documents, Desktop, and the "C" drive. Unfortunately, under the C drive I only saw a limited number of folders. I couldn't turn it on for the whole drive, and the windows and program files directories didn't appear... so I couldn't auto synch personal data being stored there. Bad Bad Bad. I am not sure why they would do that... and I couldn't figure out how to get around it. The simplicity is good... but it was almost too simple, and I didn't feel like I had enough options or control over the synch. The two options are auto on/off, and whether or not it asks you before overwritting existing files. The synch status simply tells me on or off, which isn't helpful at all (I didn't know how long it would take to do the first synch or where I was at... I had to keep checking to see how many of my files were appearing. This was annoying). When you view the drive contents... you see a bunch of files and folders (the ones that came with it). There are way too many... they should have all been contained in a single folder with maybe an autorun file outside of it. The worst is that you see a "My Documents" folder with My music, My pictures, and such inside... but this ISNT the synched folders from your laptop. HUH??? Instead you have to go into a folder named "FreeAgent Synch", look for a folder with your computer's name, and go into that. HUH??? That stuff should be front and center when I view the drive... why do you think we are buying this thing? C- (and that's a gif) for Seagate's software development team.

The Ceedo application was awful and confusing. It almost took precedent to the Seagate install, and the instructions were very poorly written. I didn't really understand exactly what it was or how it worked. Clearly I had to install things to get them to work, but what if they were already installed on my machine... how did they play together? I couldn't easily figure it out, and Ceedo's website certainly didn't help. Their instructions failed to adequately explain what it was, how it worked, how things interacted, or give any full examples. All they did was repeately use their own product name over and over "Ceedo revolutionizes blah blah blah... Ceedo takes away the confines of blah blah blah... with the Ceedo Personal Ceedo Compact Creedo Management Bar, you can gain access to your computing identity blah blah blah" And this was in the help file!!! My god, just tell me what it does and how it works. Ceedo's tech writting team gets a D-. That being said, Ceedo looks cool, is easy to access, and it seems that when I get the hang of it, it will be cool. So I will give their product managers a B+ (they would get an A if it was more obvious how to use the thing and I didn't have to rely on their bad tech writters).

This product has an amazing design for such a small and powerful drive. I am very happy with it so far and highly recommend it for anybody looking for a little drive to port between work and home or to carry their data around in. Buy it for those reasons. If you are looking for something with powerful synching tools... eh. 10/10 on the hardware, 5/10 on the software. I'll give it an 8 overall... and a recommendation.