Over the weekend I purchased the new Seagate FreeAgent 750GB drive at Costco for $225 since my digital life is requiring more and more backup and I’m flat out of space on my drives.

I was a heartbeat away from buying the Western Digital 1TB drive for $349 (since it does RAID and I could ensure redundancy if one of the drive platters inside were to fail) but did something I haven’t done before: I used my iPhone to search for "noise" and then "Western Digital 1TB" and didn’t like what I found.

Several people were talking about how the fans in the 1TB drive — when the unit was under load — sounded like a jet engine starting up. Oh great….just what I need when my MacPro tower’s ambient decibel level (it has a low level hum and the fans turn on when under load and it bugs me) has forced me to turn it off when I podcast (I instead use my MacBook Pro for recording). Since I also own a 250GB Maxtor OneTouch drive (its successor is here) which adds to the constant noise AND sounds like a small jet taking off when spinning up, noise (or the lack thereof) is a big deal to me.

Since Costco had the Seagate, I also searched on it. Every post or forum comment I read praised how quiet the drive was and so I bought it. It’s everything it’s cracked up to be, is whisper quiet and is a truly great product (especially since it sports this nifty interchangeable USB or Firewire module easy to swap out) but the unit has one exception to my love: the fancy-schmancy software on it — that does fun stuff like change the yellow color to blue visually showing its capacity — had to be wiped clean since I use a Mac. No big deal and I don’t care about color changes.

My intention is to combine desktop backup with "cloud" based backup (I’m using S3 with JungleDisk since Amazon Web Services costs are so cheap at $.15 per GB). The stuff I’ll shove into the cloud are items I want to have in perpetuity (photos, some videos) as well as secure items I want to archive (as an Mac OS disk image (.dmg) with AES 128k encryption).

I’m already thinking I might like to buy a second one of these…