Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB external hard drive

Good Lord!

What were they thinking when they designed that? Shame it would void hte warranty to cut it open and put it in a nice case which doesn't look like something out of the 80's. A nice, plain, aluminium (or even plain, scratch resisteant plastic) case with a few blue LEDs for power, disk activity and so on would have been prefeeable to this ugly thing. You would ave thought they would make it eitehr a neutra design, so it looks OK with everything, or something which shows at least a vauge resemlence to a closed laptop.

Looks apart, it seems like a reasonable piece of Tech, although not so cheap or good as some of the 3.5" external SATA drive cases with USB and eSATA plugs and a seperate HDD, although they do require you to put it together yourself.

Printing "Hello" on the bags seems like someone just couldn't think of anything better to put there, but wanted to fill the space.

warranty

One point in Seagate's favor is their standard 5 year warranty.

That doesn't get your data back of course, so my policy is to buy seagate's and mirror (or parity raid) them.

Bertie Bassett

That looks like a gigantic liquorice allsort!

WD MyBook

I didn't buy it because a seemingly detachable base that's not detachable is a strict no-no. It's just an awkward shape for an external drive.

I just bought the WD MyBook - square, black, looks like a book. Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense but works in fact very well. It came with a single USB cable, connect and you go. The book is simply cute, black, unobtrusive. And very fast, got 15MB/s out of it.

BTW you should test this with a worst case scenario. I have a folder that's about 4GB but containing 200,000 small files. If you copy that, the transfer rate drops to 500KB/s... clearly, the file system doesn't like dealing with lots of small files much.

Irresponsible design for a spinning disk

None, and I really mean NONE of these HDDs should be positioned on their sides. Not for the HDD, they can handle it, but for the impossibly narrow base.

What do think will happen if these things fall over while the disk is spinning (and they will - by nature of being portable)? Exactly, a head crash. HDD protection only applies when the disk is switched off, then the heads are moved out of the way (something we had to do manually almost 2 decades ago) so with a disk at full spin, tipping the thing over WILL spell disaster (and I've seen it happen).

From that perspective the Lacie is better if it wasn't for having an ugly habit of developing other mechanical problems - it already lies down..

Standing on edge is cute for devices without moving parts. For a device that many will use to store valuable data on such as backups, music and pictures it is, well, irresponsible.