Price : Too low to display
Smart, sleek desktop solution for storage and safekeeping of all your photos, music, videos, and more
With its huge capacity and sleek design, the Mac-ready Seagate® FreeAgentâ"¢ Desk storage solution delivers a powerful yet simple way to help safeguard all your photos, music, videos, and documents. You can get up and running quickly thanks to Mac formatting and Time Machine-readiness, then enjoy blazingly-fast transfer of your content with FireWire 800 and USB interfaces. Enjoy a modern design that complements your Mac system, and take advantage of a vertical profile that maximizes your workspace.
Count on the FreeAgent Desk storage solution to store everything on your Macâ?"and to look really good doing it.
This review is from : Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB USB 2.0 & FireWire 400/800 External Hard Drive for Mac
A Very Nice Drive:) . I have the FreeAgent Desk 500GB Mac. The only software I've needed for the drive is Time Machine.
It started right up with Time Machine backups. I have it hooked directly to my iMac via Firewire 400. The drive goes to sleep when the computer sleeps and awakens when the computer does. I have it partitioned into 2 partitions - one for backups and one for video files (which I back up on DVD's). The drive is completely quiet.
As an aside, my wife has been wirelessly backing up her MacBook to a Seagate FreeAgent Go 150GB drive that we got last year -- it was PC formatted and I changed it to Mac OS Extended Journaled and it has been flawless for almost a year now -- it is USB-connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station.
The 5-year limited warranty offered by Seagate is also great.
Note: if the drive doesn't sleep when the computer does, you may just need to check "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" in the "Energy Saver" settings of "System Preferences" and also shorten the times for screen sleep and computer sleep if it bothers you to have the drive light on when you aren't using the computer.
A Very Nice Drive:) . I have the FreeAgent Desk 500GB Mac. The only software I've needed for the drive is Time Machine.
It started right up with Time Machine backups. I have it hooked directly to my iMac via Firewire 400. The drive goes to sleep when the computer sleeps and awakens when the computer does. I have it partitioned into 2 partitions - one for backups and one for video files (which I back up on DVD's). The drive is completely quiet.
As an aside, my wife has been wirelessly backing up her MacBook to a Seagate FreeAgent Go 150GB drive that we got last year -- it was PC formatted and I changed it to Mac OS Extended Journaled and it has been flawless for almost a year now -- it is USB-connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station.
The 5-year limited warranty offered by Seagate is also great.
Note: if the drive doesn't sleep when the computer does, you may just need to check "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" in the "Energy Saver" settings of "System Preferences" and also shorten the times for screen sleep and computer sleep if it bothers you to have the drive light on when you aren't using the computer.
Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB USB 2.0 & FireWire 400/800 External Hard Drive for Mac Reviews
Seamless for use with a Mac . Absolutely no problems with this hard drive. I bought it specifically to use with the Time Machine function on my Mac. I could have spent a bit less and gotten an equivalent sized hard drive that was not configured for the Mac, but being an beginner/intermediate computer user, I wanted something that would work with minimal input on my side.
I have not been disappointed. There is not much documentation that comes with the hard drive itself; just a "quick start" guide. However, that is enough. Out of the box, I plugged it into my iMac via the firewire connection, clicked on Time Machine and presto, it was done.
I have had it running for about a month - it has basically been invisible. It runs in the background doing automatic backups and I really dont even know that it is there.
The hard drive is quiet, and takes up hardly any space on my desk. It is styled so that it fits in very well with the brushed metallic look of the iMac. It does require its' own power source, though this is a minor inconvenience.
All in all, I give it 5 starts.
Seamless for use with a Mac . Absolutely no problems with this hard drive. I bought it specifically to use with the Time Machine function on my Mac. I could have spent a bit less and gotten an equivalent sized hard drive that was not configured for the Mac, but being an beginner/intermediate computer user, I wanted something that would work with minimal input on my side.
I have not been disappointed. There is not much documentation that comes with the hard drive itself; just a "quick start" guide. However, that is enough. Out of the box, I plugged it into my iMac via the firewire connection, clicked on Time Machine and presto, it was done.
I have had it running for about a month - it has basically been invisible. It runs in the background doing automatic backups and I really dont even know that it is there.
The hard drive is quiet, and takes up hardly any space on my desk. It is styled so that it fits in very well with the brushed metallic look of the iMac. It does require its' own power source, though this is a minor inconvenience.
All in all, I give it 5 starts.
Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB USB 2.0 & FireWire 400/800 External Hard Drive for Mac Opinions
Works great for Time Machine and great 5 year warranty . Took it out of the box, plugged it into a power strip and into my 13" aluminum Macbook, configured it for Time Machine backups, and it has been working great ever since. Simple.
I really liked the 5 year warranty. To me that was the key selling point. All disk drives have some failure rate, and you can find complaints against all manufacturers. But most vendors ship their products with 1 or 2 year warranties at most. I researched many other products and was delighted to see that Seagate is willing to stand behind their products for that extended warranty duration. My suggestion is before you buy a disk drive, any drive, check out the manufacturer's web site for the warranty information first.
Works great for Time Machine and great 5 year warranty . Took it out of the box, plugged it into a power strip and into my 13" aluminum Macbook, configured it for Time Machine backups, and it has been working great ever since. Simple.
I really liked the 5 year warranty. To me that was the key selling point. All disk drives have some failure rate, and you can find complaints against all manufacturers. But most vendors ship their products with 1 or 2 year warranties at most. I researched many other products and was delighted to see that Seagate is willing to stand behind their products for that extended warranty duration. My suggestion is before you buy a disk drive, any drive, check out the manufacturer's web site for the warranty information first.
Easy as pie! . Seagate ST305005FJA105-RK FreeAgent Desk for Mac 500 GB USB 2.0/FW800 External Hard Drive (Silver) Installation was easy as pie with Firewire. Took about 4 hours for 150MB backup on an iMac. I didn't bother trying to use the software but got Super Duper.
Great with itunes on my imac . After reading mixed reviews on every single external hard drive i considered, i decided to go with the seagate on a friend's recommendation and because of the 5 year warranty.
I partitioned the drive - part for my itunes library, part for time machine backups. The automatic power save feature works well - the drive sleeps when it's not in use. It just takes a few seconds to wake up when i open itunes. It's only been a few days, but my experience with this drive has been great so far.
I partitioned the drive - part for my itunes library, part for time machine backups. The automatic power save feature works well - the drive sleeps when it's not in use. It just takes a few seconds to wake up when i open itunes. It's only been a few days, but my experience with this drive has been great so far.
Easy & reliable . I purchased this product after extensive research and after my former external hard drive died. It could not be easier to set up/ install. Mac users -- be sure to look for/ purchase the MAC version of the product -- using it with Time Machine is effortless. I am very happy with the product.
quick and easy--thumbz up . Simple plug and play setup, fast and quiet. I transferred 40 gigs of info from my old drive in probably twenty minutes with the Seagate plugged into the Firewire port and the old drive in USB. The manual is breathtaking in its brevity, so you have to search the Seagate site for more info. Only a couple of caveats. I bought this drive because I was having mounting/unmounting problems with my old external drive. I do not use Time Machine because I don't want everything backed up so I turned off the old drive when I wasn't using it. I started doing that with the Seagate and that brings up caveat one, although it's minor. No on/off power button. So I'd unmount the drive and unplug the power cord. This was okay for a couple days and then I started having some unmounting problems. I'd drag the Seagate icon to the trash and I'd get a message saying it was in use and did I want to force quit. Supposedly you can go to the Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder to see what might be causing the problem, but that didn't tell me anything. I quit all open software and this didn't make any difference. So I restarted my Mac and was able to unmount it after that. I plugged the Seagate into my old G5 and it mounted and unmounted fine. I searched online and discovered that this happens sometimes with this drive but it may not be a Seagate issue, e.g., a virus protection software that is always running, but as with most tech stuff it starts getting murky and way over my head. So that is caveat two. You may experience mounting/mounting issues as I came across a couple people who had issues with the drive not coming up on their desktop. For me, a restart or turning off both the drive and computer, unplugging everything and plugging it all back in and restarting would resolve things. I have since decided to just leave the drive plugged in and have had NO problems since. The reason I was unplugging it was to extend the life of the drive, but it goes into sleep mode so I think that won't be an issue. So if you're neurotic like me, plug it in, leave it alone! For tech heads that want to know that kind of stuff, I am using an iMac 2.66 Core i5 running 10.6.4.
Great External Hard Drive . I have a white plastic MacBook (mid 2009) that has a 160GB hard drive (internal hard drive). My iPhoto library had reached over 50GB of photos, so I decided to buy a large external hard drive to move my iPhoto library to and to make backups to.
I also have a Hitachi Blue Dusk 320GB SimpleDrive Mini that I make backups to every day, and I thought it was fairly fast. But when I recieved this external hard drive in the mail from Seagate, I found out that this thing BLAZES. With a FireWire 400 connection, the iPhoto library finished copying in around 30 mins. The cool glowing Seagate logo and underside LED lighting make this thing look like something from the future. Only one annoyance: I found the hard drive spinning noise to be very loud, but this may because I'm used to the quiet operation of the Hitachi external hard drive, which is a portable, and so it's pretty quiet.
One more note: I got this hard drive, usually $140, from Seagate on a special offer for $59, which is a real steal considering the Hitachi drive was a bargain drive for ten dollars more than that!
Thank you for reading my review. I would recommend this product to a friend.
I also have a Hitachi Blue Dusk 320GB SimpleDrive Mini that I make backups to every day, and I thought it was fairly fast. But when I recieved this external hard drive in the mail from Seagate, I found out that this thing BLAZES. With a FireWire 400 connection, the iPhoto library finished copying in around 30 mins. The cool glowing Seagate logo and underside LED lighting make this thing look like something from the future. Only one annoyance: I found the hard drive spinning noise to be very loud, but this may because I'm used to the quiet operation of the Hitachi external hard drive, which is a portable, and so it's pretty quiet.
One more note: I got this hard drive, usually $140, from Seagate on a special offer for $59, which is a real steal considering the Hitachi drive was a bargain drive for ten dollars more than that!
Thank you for reading my review. I would recommend this product to a friend.
Fool proof . I do not have a lot of confidence when it comes to computers and anything related to them, and I can say that I was able to set it up easily and that it works very well with Time Machine. One of the reasons I bought the Free Agent for Mac rather than some of the other external hard drives on the market is that it does not have to be formatted before use. For those who are interested in aesthetics, it is a very attractive design. It does have a bright light as others have said, but I don't find this to be a problem. In fact, I like it because its easy to tell if it is on.
Cons Review
Won't Boot Macintosh . Beware; just because the manufacturer formats the drive as a Macintosh, doesn't mean it has some of the necessary Mac features. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper and TechTool Pro's eDrive. None of these will boot my Mac using this drive so it's worthless as a bootable backup device. The manufacturer's comment is that they were not designed to boot a Macintosh.
I have replaced the drive with a 500 Gig LaCie which works just fine.
I have replaced the drive with a 500 Gig LaCie which works just fine.
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Product Details
EAN : 0763649009529UPC : 763649009529
MPN : ST305005FJA105-RK
Brand : Seagate
Weight : 4 pounds
Height : 6 inches
Length : 9 inches
Width : 8 inches
Binding : Electronics
Format : CD
Hardware Platform : Mac
Manufacturer : SEAGATE
Model : ST305005FJA105-RK
Operating System : Macintosh
Platform : Mac
Publisher : SEAGATE
SKU : SY2231079
Studio : SEAGATE
Where To Buy
You can buy Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB USB 2.0 & FireWire 400/800 External Hard Drive for Mac on Amazon . Click here to Read More
