Seagate Blog

GoFlex™ Home Review by Patricia Snook

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:01:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, the lovely people at Seagate (the computer hardware developers) kindly sent me through a 1terrabyte hard drive to test. With large amounts of data (images, documents, presentations, website backups) I prefer to install trust in Seagate who have a good solid reputation.

So why the excitement over a hard drive? Well, with the 1TB GoFlex™, you just sync your laptop, phone, and any other wireless device and that's it. Seagate surpassed my expectations with a fantastically easy installation set up – I promise, if I can do it, anyone else will be more than capable. I tend not to work at a workstation, but instead in bed or lounging on the sofa, and not having to worry about hard drives plugged into a usb port was a luxury. Having it sat stationary out of the way is a huge relief too, because through past experience I still maintain the fear of knocking it about accidentally and losing everything.

I had Gigabytes of images for editing so I gave it a go uploading straight to a folder on the Seagate and again I was elated at the easiness. Also, aesthetically, it's small and understated. If you need to get a new hard drive I would certainly recommend it, the GoFlex™ range is easy to set up and fantastic to use.

KEY POINTS
Ease of use: The GoFlex™ is simple to install and after a quick five minute installation, it is ready for use.
Security: A concern is always sensitive documents and information, but with this hard drive even though it is wireless, you need the installation details and passwords to gain access.
Fast data transfer: There's nothing worse than feeling like you're watching paint dry while data is being transferred. Moving a few folders of photos from recent shoots, I anticipated a long wait; again I was pleasantly proved wrong.
Stylish: A point that I feel should be made. Even though the product is in a visible place, it looks understated and is nicely compact.

GoFlex™ Home review by Patricia Snook www.awonderingstar.com

GoFlex™ 320GB and GoFlex™ 1TB For Mac Review by Alan Meban

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:13:00 +0000

A by-product of reviewing Seagate's FreeAgent GoFlex™ TV HD Media Player was that I got to play with a couple of their portable hard drives.

The FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB drive is aimed at PC users, and comes pre-formatted NTFS. Mac's can natively read NTFS. So it was nice to see that the drive came pre-loaded with a Mac NTFS driver that once installed allows you to write to NTFS drives from your Mac. Bonus! Of course, you can quickly reformat the drive to suit your purposes.

The 320GB drive is small – 11 cm x 8cm x 1.5cm – light, black and glossy. Cunningly, the USB2.0 connector section clips off from the back of the 2.5" drive, allowing you to swap it for optional FireWire or USB 3.0 connectors which should future proof it for some time to come! And with the connector removed, the portable drive can be slotted into various products in the GoFlex™ family, including their GoFlex™ TV media player and network sharing server.

Seagate have also introduced some Mac-specific drives. I tried out their 1TB GoFlex™ for Mac ultra-portable drive. Compared to its 320GB cousin, the 1TB for Mac drive is less glossy (and doesn’t pick up fingerprints!). It’s just a few millimetres thicker than its 320GB cousin – imagine a 1TB drive fitting in your pocket! – and matches well with Apple’s brushed aluminium look. The Mac drive comes with software to allow PC’s to connect.

The Mac version is bundled with both USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 interface connectors.

Speed wise both drives performed faster than my 3 year old 80GB portable USB drive! While not as scientific as a lab-based performance test, I times copying a 1.7GB video from my Mac Mini across to the drives (and back) and compared it with my old (non-Seagate) 80GB USB drive.

Connected by USB 2.0, the FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB was the fastest, writing the video to its disk in 75 seconds and sending it back to the Mac Mini in 59 seconds.

Also connected by USB 2.0, the larger 1TB for Mac drive was marginally slower, writing the video to disk in 78 seconds, and took 56 seconds in the other direction.

For comparison, my old 80GB USB drive took 105 seconds to write the video, and 68 seconds in the other direction.

Both drives are a great size, and the ability to change the interface from USB 2.0 to Firewire and even USB 3.0 means the drives will make them usable long into the future. Very impressive drives.

GoFlex™ 320GB and GoFlex™ 1TB For Mac Review by Alan Meban
http://alaninbelfast.blogspot.com/

GoFlex™ for Mac Review by Tim Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:17:00 +0000

I have been trying Seagate's GoFlex™ for Mac portable drive, which packs 1TB of storage into a small, light, USB-powered package.

The drive measures around 120x88x22mm – small enough to fit easily in a pocket or bag. Spin speed is 5400 RPM which is a little disappointing. But what makes it a "Mac" drive? Mainly that it comes pre-formatted with Apple's HFS + (Hierarchical File System Plus) file system, which is ideal for performance and reliability under OS X. A possible snag is that HFS+ is not readable from Windows by default, though Seagate has a solution, of which more in a moment.

It is worth noting that you can easily reformat the drive for Windows NTFS if you want. There is a GoFlex™ app for the Mac which includes an information tab, a drive test, and the ability to disable the activity lights on the drive. I cannot imagine why you would want to do that.

Seagate's GoFlex™ series has a few extra tricks. The most distinctive is that the interface is removable, which means you are not restricted to the usual USB 2.0. This GoFlex™ for Mac drive come with two, one for USB 2.0 and the other for FireWire 800, which is substantially faster: up to 786Mbps vs 480 Mbps. USB 3.0 and eSATA interfaces are available separately.

Currently the MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro have FireWire 800 ports. It does make sense to use the faster port when available, especially with a drive of this size, though I cannot help thinking it would have been even handier if Seagate had managed to build the two ports into the main case, rather than having them as clip-on extras.

Still, the fact that you can remove the interface enables another GoFlex™ trick, the ability to slot the drive into a Media Sharing Dock. I’ve reviewed this dock here; it is a handy device though I have some usability concerns. I tried this with the GoFlex™ Mac and it worked well, an advantage being that you can access the files over a network irrespective of whether your operating system understands HFS+. Trivial point: the GoFlex™ drive is silver whereas the dock is black, a slight visual mismatch.

But what if you want to direct-attach your GoFlex™ for Mac drive to a Windows machine? Seagate has done a deal with Paragon to bundle its HFS for Windows driver. This normally costs around $40.00. It works too; though installation was not quite seamless. The problem is that the drive has to be attached for the install to work, presumably to protect Paragon from unauthorised installs. But when you attach the drive, both Windows and the Seagate Manager for Windows (if installed) prompt you to format it.

If you agree to format the drive, you will lose any files already on it, so I clicked Cancel. However, while installing the drive software I got this dialog *again* – I suppose the thing to do is to check "don’t show again". Seagate should update its Windows manager software to be HFS-aware. Once I had the Paragon HFS+ driver installed, and restarted Windows, everything was fine.
I would guess though that most customers for this drive will be using it with Macs and will not run into this issue. It is nice to have a drive designed with the Apple Mac in mind, and with generous 1TB or 1.5TB capacity this is a solid product.

Disclosure: Kudos to Seagate for asking me to mention in my review that that the review sample does not have to be returned.

GoFlex™ for Mac Review by Tim Anderson

http://gadgets.itwriting.com/?p=230

GoFlex™ TV HD Media Player Review by Alan Meban

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Over the last week or so I’ve been trying out a Seagate home media product to see how it works. The FreeAgent GoFlex™ TV HD Media Player is a small 15cm x 11cm x 4cm black box that can beside any set top boxes or DVD players and plugs into your TV or monitor.

The media player unit has no permanent built-in storage, but the front panel is hinged allowing you to open it up and slot in a compatible drive, in my case a FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB drive.

As a Mac user, I hooked the drive up first to a free USB port on my Mac Mini, reformatted it and copied a selection of video files onto it. Then it was simply a matter of pulling the USB connector off the back of drive and slotting it into the GoFlex™ TV. You’re not tied to using the neat GoFlex™ drives. Larger capacity drives – like Seagate’s GoFlex™ 1TB drive which is too thick to fit in the slot – as well as non-Seagate drives can be attached using the media player’s two USB ports.

If your camera has a USB cable, you can plug it straight into the GoFlex™ TV too and quickly share your pictures on a big screen. You can also access media on shared drives if you configure the GoFlex™ TV with shortcuts to other devices in your home network.

Synchronisation software promises to quickly copy media from selected folders on your computer onto the portable drive, allowing you to take it downstairs to the living room. If you have several computers at home, each one can synchronise into difference directories on the portable drive. A neat solution. However, on my Mac Mini running Snow Leopard (10.6.6), I couldn’t persuade the supplied Seagate Media software to synchronise any movies, photos or music. So it was drag and drop all the way.

You can easily hook the GoFlex™ TV up to a range of displays using the supplied composite, component or SCART leads. It supports HDMI too – but bring your own cable! On the audio side, it comes with a stereo phono lead, but also offers a digital optical S/PDIF connector.

Once you’ve got some content connected to the GoFlex™ TV it works very well. At 1080p over HDMI, high definition video files played back smoothly full screen. Lower resolution content looked fine when it was upscaled. While watching a video, you can pause, fast forward and rewind using the supplied 21 button remote control. One nice touch is that if you’re fast forwarding and press the play button, the video jumps back a little before starting to play, preventing you overshooting the scene you wanted to see. Unfortunately there’s no easy way to skip through longer clips in 5 minute intervals.

If you leave the GoFlex™ PC connected to the internet, you can watch YouTube videos, browse Picasa or Flickr photo albums as well as check the weather. There are also a number of US/international video feeds and some text feeds too. Headlines from BBC World News website are available, but not the BBC’s UK news. And you’ll need to skip over the “Please turn on Javascript messages” and squint past the very basic formatting.

Flicking through the configuration menus, I noticed that a firmware upgrade was available. It took 1 minute to download and a further two minutes to install and reboot. Much faster than some other devices I’ve used.

There are some nice usability touches. You can plug in a USB keyboard to the GoFlex™ PC to bypass tediously navigating the on-screen keyboard using the remote. Works with wireless keyboards via USB dongles too.

The remote is very directional. If I didn’t aim the remote straight at the GoFlex™ TV box, I was left pressing buttons and wondering why nothing was happening. Other remote controls around the house seem to be more powerful, allowing the infrared signal to be bounced off a wall or the ceiling and still be picked up.

While the GoFlex™ TV has an attractive case, and Seagate has cracked video playback, the user interface is quite basic. As a set top box-like device, I wanted a more magical experience, that better hid the technology that lay inside the device.

Once you get past the shiny front menu, the next set of screens and menus are a lot less slick. Click on Movies and the default view shows a simple 6 by 3 grid of thumbnails. It doesn’t display thumbnails for very many of my videos, and only shows the first 12 or so characters of the filenames.

The alternative "list" view makes it easier to select the right content, particularly if you want to tell the difference between videos named _.mpg. However, none of the views show the filesize or clip length.

When you connect a drive into the GoFlex™ TV, there’s a short delay while it indexes the media content, and collates together all the movies / photos into a flat structure. So all your films and clips appear in the one list. The menu also allows you to browse the directory structure of attached drives. However, it’s not very elegant, and when sitting in front of the TV, I’m not sure I want to know that the attached storage is drive “D”.

The GoFlex™ TV's HDMI output requires that you directly connect it into a display that supports HDCP (content protection). It's only a minor thing, but if you try to pass the signal through a video router or scalar, or use a cheap HDMI->DMI converter cable to get into an older display, you'll have to switch to the supplied component or composite video cable instead of using the HDMI output.

Overall, as a media player, the GoFlex™ TV works well. As a media browser, the user interface lets it down. But if you can live with that and can make the synchronisation software work, the GoFlex™ TV is an attractive media player solution for families that want to share content in their living room that normally lives on multiple computers scattered throughout the house.

(The FreeAgent GoFlex™ TV HD Media Player and FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB drive supplied to me by Seagate in exchange for a review.)

GoFlex™ TV HD Media Player Review by Alan Meban http://alaninbelfast.blogspot.com/

GoFlex™ 320GB Review by Tim Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:47:00 +0000

You may think that one portable hard drive is very like another; and that is a problem for manufacturers like Seagate which want to differentiate their range and build customer loyalty. The trouble is, one portable hard drive really is very like another; so what can it do? The FreeAgent GoFlex™ range is its answer, and Seagate has sent me the 320GB model for review. It is billed as the "world's most upgradeable hard drive" though you can't upgrade the thing you might most want to, its capacity.

What you can upgrade is the interface. The GoFlex™ drive has a detachable interface which in the model supplied to me has a mini USB port on one end, and what looks like a SATA (Serial ATA) connector on the other.

You can replace the interface with FireWire 800, USB 3.0, or eSATA. To give you an idea of the performance implications, this is what each of these interconnects is capable of in theory, though I have not measured the performance of this implementation:

USB 2.0: 480 Mbps
USB 3.0: 4.8 Gbps
FireWire 800 786 Mbps
eSATA 3Gbps

You can see from this that USB 3.0 is theoretically the fastest, though if I am right in thinking that the drive itself has a SATA interface, it will not be any faster than eSATA and will likely be a little slower. However, USB 3.0 is the future and will be more commonly found on PCs and laptops – except for Apple fans who now have Thunderbolt at 10Gbps – so that is the pragmatic choice. Currently though, most computers only have USB 2.0, in which case you will need to get a USB 3.0 card for your computer as well as for the hard drive.

I question whether many users will bother to upgrade the interface on a portable hard drive. They are more likely simply to buy another one, especially as capacities steadily increase, making new drives better value in terms of the amount of storage you get. The downside of the GoFlex™ removable interface is that it makes the drive slightly bigger than it would otherwise be.

That said, it does have an additional benefits. You can plug the drive directly into a GoFlex™ media dock, which will be the subject of my next review, or into a variety of other docks which Seagate offers.

There are a few other things to mention. I use both Mac and PC, and while the GoFlex™ drive works fine with a Mac, it comes formatted as NTFS which on most Macs is read-only. However, the drive comes with a Mac installer that offers to install the Paragon NTFS driver, which enables read-write, or to reformat for OS X.

I’d suggest reformatting for the Mac, unless you are likely to use the drive for exchanging files between Mac and PC.

I should also mention that the GoFlex™ drive comes with some bundled software. Seagate has done a deal with Memeo and offers to install various pieces of free and trial software.

Since you can get all this software easily enough from the Memeo website, I am not greatly impressed, though there is a free copy of Instant Backup which would otherwise cost $29.95. Personally I use Windows 7 and I am happy to use Microsoft’s built-in backup software, though Memeo has a continuous backup system that looks interesting.

Online backup, which is a feature of Memeo's paid-for Premium Backup, is definitely a step up from what is built in, but in this case you have to buy online storage space as well as the backup software so it is not going to be cheap – especially if, like me, you have ripped a large CD collection to a hard drive.

The big question: do the extra features in GoFlex™ amount to enough to meet Seagate’s goal of differentiating its range? The ability to dock the drive is handy, and if you plan on using the media dock then yes, but otherwise you may not really notice any benefit, though it is worth getting a USB 3.0 drive if you can use it or expect to be able to soon.

That said, from what I can tell there is little if any price premium for the GoFlex™ drives and my 320GB sample worked well, though 320GB is rather small these days, and I’d suggest that at least a 500GB model makes more sense if you plan on storing multimedia files or keeping backups.
GoFlex™ portable drives are also available in 500GB, 750GB, 1TB and 1.5TB capacity. The sizes of 750GB and above have a fatter case: 22mm instead of 14.5mm. The 1.5TB drive is USB 3.0 only.

Disclosure: Kudos to Seagate for asking me to mention in my review that that the review sample does not have to be returned.

GoFlex™ 320GB Review by Tim Anderson http://gadgets.itwriting.com/?p=191

GoFlex™ Net Review by Tim Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:47:00 +0000

Seagate's GoFlex™ media sharing device, also called GoFlex™ Net, is a dock with an ethernet connection. You can either attach a single USB drive – though the port is only USB 2.0, sadly – or else plug a GoFlex™ portable drive (reviewed here) into one or both of the two slots on top.

If you use one of the slots, then a four-position LED gauge at the front indicates how full your drive is. Lots of lights means nearly full.

Now your drive(s) are attached to the network – but how do you access them? The key thing to realise is that this dock is also a Pogoplug. This is an online service that communicates with your local drives and enables you to access your files over the internet, or share them with friends.

This means that you have to register with Pogoplug, starting with a link on Seagate's site for registering and activating your dock. I ran into a small problem here. First, I am behind a firewall and I had to enable UDP 4365 send and receive in order to enable Pogoplug to communicate with the Pogoplug service. Second, I had to type in the serial number from the device in order to activate, which in my case meant disconnecting it from the network temporarily. This might explain why there was a long delay before I received a confirming email; and until you click the link in this email your Pogoplug is not really activated. I also found some usability issues in the setup. I looked at the Security Settings in my Pogoplug web dashboard and wanted to know the purpose of Enable SSH access for this Pogoplug device:

As you can see from the screen, there is a help link at top right. However, clicking this takes you to the home page for Seagate support:

Pretty useless in this context.

It turns out there is a story behind this. Each Pogoplug device runs Linux. Cloud Engines, the company which runs Pogoplug, had the bright idea of enabling access to the Linux terminal over SSH, so you could log into your Pogoplug from anywhere and do anything, provided you know Linux. SSH was enabled by default, and with a default password too. This was a security hole, as bloggers like Rob Pickering observed. So now SSH access is disabled by default, and when you enable it you are prompted to create a new password. Much better.

In fact the security risk was not all that great, because typically Pogoplug is behind a firewall and unless you redirect the SSH port to the device, attempts to access it from the internet would fail anyway.

Anyway, I enabled it for internal access only, and was able to get to the Linux shell.

I also downloaded the Pogoplug software which enables you to access your attached drives as drive letters in Windows. There is similar software for Linux and the Mac. I was puzzled by the option to Enable multi-drive mode; again there is no help for this.

It is no big deal and you can find it explained here; it makes a small difference to how the drives appear in your file manager, for example Windows Explorer.

Once I had done all this I had a P drive on my desktop:

If you use this on a laptop, you can still see the P drive when out and about, provided you are on the Internet.

The folder called "Files shared with me" is initially perplexing. This refers to files shared with you by other Pogoplug users. It is nothing to do with files you are sharing out.

I thought, "There must be an iPhone app for this"; and there is. I downloaded it. It worked great over home wifi and I could access the drive; but what about when on the go? I turned the wifi off, so I was connecting over 3G only. Sadly the results were poor and I kept getting Error code 5 when I tried to view some images. In the end I created a tiny text file and managed to view it successfully, proving that the system can work:

Note that Pogoplug never copies your stuff to its own drives, and when you access files locally they are not going over the Internet. Nothing is backed up online, even though it appears as if you can see your files on the Web.

But what about the GoFlex dock?
Indeed. This is meant to be a review of Seagate's GoFlex™ media sharing device, but it is mostly about Pogoplug.

This is an issue. The front of the GoFlex™ box does not mention Pogoplug, though it is named on the back. The fact is, someone might buy this expecting a simple NAS (Networked Attached Storage) device, expecting to get immediately to the stage where the attached drives appear in Windows Explorer.

Instead, they find themselves having to agree to Pogoplug terms and conditions, and being handed a bunch of Internet features which may or may not be required. As I discovered, you can also have firewall issues.

It is possible to access the drives over a Windows network without using Pogoplug – but only after enabling Windows File Sharing for each drive, which is done through … the Pogoplug service. See the GoFlex™ Net User Guide [PDF] for more details.

It is also worth noting that this is a media sharing device and not a media streaming device. Well, that is not quite true; Pogoplus has added some basic media streaming using Upnp; but I had limited success when trying to use it with a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. On the PS3 I could view pictures OK, but even playing an MP3 file stuttered.

More positively, it is also true that the Pogoplug tie-in offers genuinely useful features. In a nutshell, it is file sharing over the Internet. There are other solutions for this, some aimed mainly at businesses, but Pogoplug’s effort is simple and cost-effective. Since the files remain on your own drive, there are no issues about having to purchase more space as there are with Internet synchronisation services like Dropbox. If you have a large amount of files which you want to make available from anywhere, Pogoplug is worth investigating.

Of course you could just buy a Pogoplug rather than Seagate's GoFlex™ dock. The most obvious difference is that the basic Pogoplug, which costs much the same as Seagate's device, has four USB 2.0 ports, whereas the GoFlex has one USB 2.0 port and two of special GoFlex™ docks which only fit GoFlex™ portable drives. If you do have GoFlex™ drives, the Seagate option is more convenient and looks better too.

Could do better
This is a decent product, but as is often the case among vendors other than Apple, strong features are spoilt by poor documentation and presentation.

My suggestion to Seagate: redesign the product slightly so that Pogoplug services are optional rather than required; and have an install application that does the magic of enabling Windows File Sharing without the need to register for Pogoplug at all. Then Pogoplug can be presented as an optional benefit, rather than being something forced upon you.

The packaging should be clearer and more open about the Pogoplug element of the product. I’d add that both Seagate and Pogoplug need to work on conveying the essence of what the service does clearly, accurately and concisely. Misunderstandings seem to be common.

Nevertheless, this is a clever and capable device. It is just that it is nothing special as a NAS device, and poor as a media streamer.

Disclosure: Kudos to Seagate for asking me to mention in my review that that the review sample does not have to be returned.

GoFlex™ Net Review by Tim Anderson http://gadgets.itwriting.com/?p=204

GoFlex™ 320GB Review by GadgetLite.com

noreply@blogger.com (Blogger Admin) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:32:00 +0000

Seagate's been in the hard drive business for donkeys years and recently we were sent one of their relatively new (2010) FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB portable external hard drives for a review. Their main selling point? - Its the 'World's most upgradeable hard drive', we'll see in the quick review below what they actually mean by that.

Design

Available in metallic silver, black, blue and red depending on your choice of memory capacity (up to 1.5TB), we've got the lowest capacity 320GB version. Our first impressions were that it comes with the typical rather high-maintenance-but fancy gloss paint, especially our black one but to hold, it weighs just 150g. Like our Iomega Prestige portable hard drive which we frequently use here at GadgetLite, its not too fiddly, the only other accessory you need is the adapter and USB cable to get started. We'll be talking more about the advantages of its adapter below.

It isn't the thinnest portable drive you'll ever see, and it isn't thinner than your iPod Touch but its not too far off at just under 14mm as our 20p coin demonstrates.

Features

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex™ ultra portable drive houses a 5400 rpm 2.5" hard disk, this is instead of the newer, faster but usually more pricier 7200 rpm hard disk. If you read earlier, Seagate boasts its new line up of GoFlex™ portable drives to be the world's most upgradeable, this is explained mainly by its interchangeable interface adapter not because its drives are 'futureproof' as such.

Interface Connectors

As you can see in the photo above, the pictured USB 2.0 interface connection adapter which came out of the box is made of two parts, a universal connector for all GoFlex™ drives and at the other end a cable which offers the possibility of an upgrade for greater file transfer speeds. So essentially what Seagate have done with its GoFlex™ family is given them all the same connection adapter but made it universally fitting for a range of different cables, this means if you opt to buy a specific, dedicated cable upgrade kit, for example Firewire 800 kit for your Macbook Pro, you just need to plug in that cable but use the same drive as normal.

Its considered to be 'most upgradeable' simply because of this, the current available options for upgrade are USB 3.0 eSATA and Firewire 800 - this is only if you're unhappy with USB 2.0's transfer speed and need to shift large files quickly. Frankly, the downside is you'll probably find yourself carrying both cables as we reckon USB 2.0 will still be the most compatible across whatever machines you're looking to hook up with for a number of years to come.

If you stick to the USB 2.0 which comes with the drive, theoretically you'd get a transfer data speed of roughly 57 MB/s. However, due to the mechanical nature of the drive and transfer protocol of USB 2.0, the transfer speed won’t hit that upper limit, although it may come close.

Benchmarking

So let's test out some transfer speeds, we did a quick comparison with our Iomega Prestige portable drive which is too a 5400 rpm 2.5" hard disk but with 500GB capacity. We tested the drives on the same USB port one by one on our MacBook Pro using Xbench, and here were the results.

As you can see in the screenshots above, there were barely any noticeable differences between the Seagate's and the Iomega's performances. Unfortunately we couldn't test the USB 3.0 cable kit we were sent as we only had our MacBook Pro as our testing platform but based on other reviewer's benchmark results we were able to see the following improvement in transfer speeds:

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex™ 500GB (USB 2.0) Benchmark
Linear Read (Begin): 32.1 MB/s
Linear Read (Middle): 31.6 MB/s
Linear Read (End): 32.1 MB/s
Random Read: 31.5 MB/s
Buffered Read: 29.7 MB/s
Average Read Access: 23.13 ms

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex™ 500GB (USB 3.0) Benchmark
Linear Read (Begin): 81.3 MB/s
Linear Read (Middle): 66.7 MB/s
Linear Read (End): 39.5 MB/s
Random Read: 64.2 MB/s
Buffered Read: 83.8 MB/s
Average Read Access: 22.12 ms

[via MyDigitalLife]

As you can see, using a USB 3.0 interface adapter / cable does at least double transfer speeds but from the testing above, it would be difficult for us to imagine how using the upgrade kit could allow you to receive up to x10 faster speeds than USB 2.0 (as claimed by Seagate).

Seagate Dashboard and Memeo Instant Backup - is it any good?

If you're a Mac user, we wouldn't advise you to dig into using Seagate's included Dashboard backup solution software as Time Machine on Mac OS X works just as well if not better. If you're a PC user, the drive will already have prompt you automatically to install Seagate Dashboard and therefore start running Memeo Instant Backup when you first plug in (if not, its setup files can be located within the drive itself).

Essentially Seagate Dashboard comes from Memeo, unfortunately, with your purchase of the GoFlex™ drive, you'll only get a free license to the full Memeo Instant Backup and not Premium Backup, Memeo Sync, Memeo AutoSync, Memeo Share and Memeo Send, all of these are trial only.

As for the features of Memeo Instant Backup, here's a quick summary...
- Secures backed up files and protects privacy with powerful encryption.
- Schedule backup.
- Restore entire drive or individual files.
- View at-a-glance drive statistics, including available capacity.

When we started it up for the first time, it started to backup based on our customised setting (complete or selected folders / drives) and worked as a background device, doing a complete backup 1:1 copy which we selected including all open files. Immediately after the backup, you can eject the drive, however, Instant Backup will continue to be running in the background monitoring changes that you make to your drive / folders. This is different from Time Machine for Mac which has the same feature but only runs when your drive is plugged in, in contrast Instant Backup will constantly do this in the background without taking away too much of your system's resources.

The next time you are connect your drive, only those changes that have been made are saved and used for creating a new backup and thus it won't need to take as much time as it did the first run. In case something gets lost or a file gets damaged, its also possible to restore the files by simply dragging the chosen file from the backup. If the backup at some point gets too full, the older files are automatically deleted. The majority of backing up during our testing ran in the background without any annoying prompts, in fact, we just needed to plug it in and continue writing our review, it was that simple to use.

Conclusion

Seagate offers the FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB ultra portable external hard drive here in the UK with a pricetag of £69.99, which is at a relatively high end of the portable drives' normal price range considering it only boasts 320GB capacity. You also receive only a 2-year limited warranty to protect against factory defects, nothing outstanding taking into account what you're paying.

Despite this, you can see in this review as we have highlighted, a number of excellent features which are not normally found or done brilliantly from other brands. From our benchmark testing, you'll have noticed that just the drive alone with a standard USB 2.0 connection, the portable drive performs at a similar speed to other brands (in this case, our Iomega Prestige) but the advantage of buying a FreeAgent GoFlex™ family drive kicks in as soon as you resort to an upgrade kit specific for your machine. Though number-wise, we were disappointed that didn't see a performance improvement as significant as what Seagate had claimed, we were still pleased with the results.

Pros
- Slim, small highly portable design
- Universal interface connectors which are used across the current GoFlex™ family of portable drives
- Offers the possibility of upgrade for greater transfer speeds

Cons
- High maintenance glossy design if you opt for any of the colours except silver
- Pricey for the capacity you’re getting, but a definite bargain if you can find it at a discounted price
- Unable to reach anywhere near the claimed transfer speed with the upgrade kit

Review: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB ultra portable drive by GadgetLite.com