Seagate FreeAgent: I love great products…
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…
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About Steve Borsch
Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.
Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
Got a FreeAgent 3-4 months ago, love it. The sales clerk tried to stear me toward a WesternDigital but in all the time I’ve been computing, the only drive I’ve had go south prematurely was a WD so that wasn’t going to be an option. Seagate must really be PC oriented though, there isn’t a mention of the Mac anywhere in the docs that came with the drive. Works like a champ though.
So what do we Mac users have to do to utilize this fabulous hard drive (which is on sale at a CostCo near me, too :-)? Will it work to just not download the software that comes with it?
format the drive to fat32 and you can use it with a mac or a xbox360 (great for movies!) or just about anything you can think of! ( the drive is originaly a NTFS drive)
format the drive to fat32 and you can use it with a mac or a xbox360 (great for movies!) or just about anything you can think of! ( the drive is originaly a NTFS drive)