Seagate FreeAgent Desktop ST310005FDA2E1-RK 1 TB Hard Drive, 3.5" External

The pre-installed software on the drive required very little input from me; the drive, once set up will operate autonomously if desired. The huge capacity of the drive plus the generously priced availablity is what sold me. As a backup for two active hard drives this unit should serve me well for a very long time considering it will be dormant for most of the time; I do weekly backups.

Seven external HDs under my belt over the last decade. Chose this for their reputation, warranty, comments online, my past experience. Efficient installation on XP Pro and Vista Ultimate machines, quiet, runs warm but not hot even with stand. Nice that is stackable when horizontal. Have used for two months without a problem. I think I will get a couple more to swap regularly for safety/security of data. Not as svelte as the ToGos, but the price point is hard to beat.

Here's how to use the FreeAgent Desk USB drive with the Linux operating system: . Note: this procedure makes the drive unusable with MS-Windows and deletes the Seagate Windows software on it. . Using cfdisk, remove the only (NTFS) partition and make a new one. Then put an ext3 filesystem on it: . mkfs.ext3 -i 300000 -m 1 -j -v /dev/sdx1 . where sdx is the device name the system puts the USB drive on (/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, whatever). I use 300K bytes/inode because most of my space is taken by large multi-megabyte files. . To use the disk, mount its partition on, e.g., /mnt. . I use the mc (Midnight Commander) program to back up all of my files, but for an incremental backup you'll want a specialized backup program. . It takes 5-6 hours for 500GB of files, and the drive stays cool, on its stand in a vertical position (at least if the room temperature is 70 degrees F.). There's no activity light, but when the drive is seeking you can feel a faint vibration in it if you put your hand on it. . BE SURE TO UNMOUNT THE DRIVE explicitly with the umount command before disconnecting the USB cable, unplugging the drive's power, turning off the computer, etc. Otherwise the files on the drive may be lost.

The product exceed all expectations as far as ease of use and setup. The only thing that is negative is that you need to have enough desktop real estate to have it sit on your desk or in a close enough shelf. Overall it is quiet and does exactly what is needed to backup all of your files and enough room to hold several months of complete backups of photos and improtant documents.

Very cost-effective 1TB storage. I use mine for system backup on an aging Compaq desktop computer that's nearly 5 years old and don't want the grief of losing files if/when the system hard drive finally fails. The drive represents true plug & play simplicity; just plug it into a spare USB port and the system does the rest. Necessary USB cable and DC power supply (yet another wall wart...) are included. If you want stick-simple external storage or system backup, this is a very good choice.

When I went to the Seagate web site to register this, it said the warranty expired in 2010. Customer support told me they don't support these drives anymore. The copyright on the user guide was 2008.

I've had this drive less than a month, and I'm already having to move everything back to old drives and return this one. It has two problems that I've identified. First, it fails at random intervals. When it fails, Windows Explorer and shell prompts continue to show a directory structure, but all plain files are missing. "Properties" continues to show disk usage as expected, but no files appear in any listings. Second, even when it IS up, other devices on the USB bus stop and (after about 1s) restart constantly. This piece of garbage is going back to the store, and I'll never buy another Seagate product again.

While the price for this drive is excellent, the enclosure causes the HD to overheat, making it into a $100 doorstop. Do not put critical files onto this drive without backing them up elsewhere, because if/when the drive fails, Seagate charges up to $1900 for data recovery.

Do a seach for freeagent and dead drive. Drive dies and you lose all of your information. I am a computer tech and this is a hardware fault not repairable. Cost 400-2000 dollars to get your information recovered. Beware! Died in 2 weeks. Thousands of people with the same problem.

I had this hard drive for about two months. I am a photographer and I had put EVERYTHING on it. Now after only two months, it won't turn on and everything is lost. It's my career and I have nothing to show for it. Storing data is this things JOB and it doesn't work.