Company: Seagate
Price: $170
Product : FreeAgent Go Special Edition

Portability Rating: 5 stars
Durability: 4.5 stars
Re-use Value: 5 stars
Overall Rating: 4.7 stars

With its glossy aluminum finish, chrome trim, and jet black top and bottom cover, the 500 GB Seagate FreeAgent Go Special Edition makes it extremely convenient to carry your photos, music, videos and documents anywhere, without sacrificing good looks. The drive looks spectacular, and comes pre-loaded with easy-to-use software that helps you retain your data with automatic data backup and encryption of your important files, folders, etc. You can even sync content so you’ll always have your most current versions while on the go. In addition to the amazing looking drive, Seagate made things even better by including a piano black desktop dock, making it easier than ever to connect to the computer without having to fumble with wires The FreeAgent Go Special Edition even contains a massive amount of storage, without taking up a massive amount of space, that can hold a lot of your video, photos, music, files, and more.

The FreeAgent Go Special Edition is 5.1 x 3.1 x 0.4 inches and weighs a mere 0.35 lbs (0.16 kg). While the drive may not slide in your pocket, it’s thin enough to fit in almost any pouch. It is of course, tiny and light enough to slide into basically any bag as well. I honestly think that this is the most gorgeous portable drive I have ever seen or used. It even sports a series of white lights on the bottom portion of the top cover that pulsate when the drive is active, and slowly fade down as the drive activity decreases.

The Seagate FreeAgent Go Special Edition comes in two great color combinations; black and silver, and red and silver. You can of course buy the original FreeAgent Go (not special Edition) in blue, red, silver, and black, but I really recommend the black & silver Special Edition Go over all of the other color choices you can chose from.

The Seagate FreeAgent Go proved to be pretty fast for a USB drive. It was able to read about 5 GB worth of videos, photos, music, and documents in 4 minutes, a rate of about 22 Mbps. In my tests, the Go achieved a write speed of about 20 Mbps. I still prefer FireWire drives, since they are way faster, and require only one wire to connect, but it has become my favorite external USB drive by far.

The Windows-only Seagate Manager software that is pre installed on the drive, was up and running in less than a minute. I was able to select the files that I wanted to back up for safe keeping swiftly. I was also able to quickly set a day and time that I wanted backups to occur. After that, the software was basically on auto-pilot, and did everything by itself just as it was told. The software was really convenient for the PC; it reminded me of Time Machine, which if you don’t know is the Mac backup program that is built-in to every Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. Seagate Manager also let us create a password-protected folder that safeguards files with 256-bit AES encryption. Lastly, the Sync option permits users to access our data when we plugged the FreeAgent Go Special Edition into another PC, so I always had the most current versions of my files at my fingertips when moving the drive from PC to PC.

Overall, the 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go Special Edition is my favorite external hard drive hands down. The design is stunning, the capacity is huge, and the overall experience was just amazing. My only suggestion is for Seagate to bring back FireWire capabilities.