Storage

With a stylish brushed aluminium casing and a formatted capacity of 931GB, Seagate's FreeAgent Desk drive is an attractive option as desktop backup drive. It can lie flat on a desktop or shelf or stand upright in the supplied holder where space is limited. Its low cost per gigabyte of 32 cents makes it one of the most competitively priced backup drives on the market.

The front panel is tapered and punctuated with an array of cooling vents - although the drive runs with very minimal heat produced. As with the FreeAgent Go drive, the logo and surrounding vents double as a power and status indicator, which lights up and pulses when drive is active and fades as it enters sleep mode. The drive automatically defaults to sleep mode if it is inactive for 15 minutes. Supplied with the drive is an AC adaptor/ power supply, a 1.6 metre long USB cable and a compact stand with four rubber feet. The software is pre-loaded in the drive.

The FreeAgent Desk drive mounted in the supplied stand.

The software is the same Seagate Manager application, which we have already covered in our review of the FreeAgent Go drive (INSERT LINK). Although its main use is to activate automatic backups and file synchronisation and engage data encryption, it can also be used to change indicator, sleep mode and encryption settings to suit individual users' requirements.

The drive supplied for our review was a 1TB capacity mode that was formatted for Windows and had a USB 2.0 interface. Unfortunately, the power plug on the AC adaptor was incompatible with the local mains system so we were forced to run the drive through a power plug adaptor - and we've marked the Build of the drive down accordingly. We can't say whether this affected drive performance.

FreeAgent Desk for Mac drives are also available in 500GB and 1TB capacities. These drives come with a FireWire 800/400 connection and are tuned to be Time Machine ready.

With an all-up weight of just over 1.1 kg (including the AC power supply and cables, the FreeAgent Desk drive is too heavy to be used for portable storage. However, its small size and high capacity - along with the efficient software - make it an affordable backup choice.

Performance
Unlike the FreeAgent Go drive, the FreeAgent Desk drive was happy to interact with our computer through a USB 2.0 hub. However, this slowed data transfer times and with our 2.5GHz PC running Windows XP (Service Pack 3) it took 36 minutes and 24 seconds to transfer the same 30.8GB folder as we used for testing the FreeAgent Go drive's data transfer times. This equates to a transfer rate of approximately 8.33MB/second.
When connected to the computer via a USB 2.0 port, the transfer time came back to 27 minutes and 2 seconds. That's not as fast as the FreeAgent Go drive we tested but equivalent to 8.8MB/second.

Type: Desktop storage drive
Capacity: 500GB, 640GB, 1.0TB, 1.5TB
Rotational speed: 7200 RPM
Interface: USB 2.0
Data transfer rate: up to 480 Mb/s
Cache:
Power supply:
Dimensions: 175.0 x 33.7 x 172 mm
Weight:  1.0 kg