Company: Seagate
Price: 500 GB: $129, 1 TB: $189, 1.5 TB $219
Product : FreeAgent Desk for Mac

Convenience Rating: 4 stars
Durability: 4.5 stars
Re-use/Replay Value: 4.5 stars
Overall Rating: 4.3 stars

If your a real Apple fanboy, you are probably picky about appearance.  Thankfully, Seagate released their new Seagate FreeAgent Desk specially for the Mac!  It looks beautiful in my office because the white stand, and modern silver drive almost mocks my iMac, and you don’t feel like it is clutter.  The stand raises the drive about an inch so it can cool through the vent holes, but I found another benefit, if I spill a glass of water, etc. the stand will only get wet, not the drive.  Overall, the drive is a nice size for an external drive, but the stand is not removable! That means that you can’t stack multiple drives on top of each other, or lay it flat.

Specs:

The FreeAgent Desk for Mac measures 7.28″ in H x 1.48″ in W x 5.98″ in L and it weighs  2.2 pounds (1 kg). It is definitely not travel friendly, and if your looking for a compact portable drive, you should pick up the FreeAgent Go instead. It is certainly one of the more upper-class looking drives since it sports a metal and white enclosure.  My un-tech savvy friends thought that Apple made it.  To make the drive even more Apple-like, Seagate added a series of white LEDs underneath the stand that glow when the drive is active. and slowly fade off when the drive is ready to eject, or when the drive hasn’t been in use for a while.  Even the Seagate logo lights up, just like the Apple logo on the Macbook series.  The drive can connect to your computer via Firewire 400 or 800 and USB.

Performance:

Since the FreeAgent Desk can connect to your computer through firewire, transfer speeds are phenomenal. I have a 3 year  old intel iMac, so it doesn’t have any firewire 800 ports, but I tested it while it was connected via firewire 400.  In my tests, the Seagate Desk took 2 ½ seconds to copy a 51.2 megabyte video file.   So technically, if you were connected via firewire 800, the transfer speed should be doubled, but I don’t have any actual test results with firewire 800 to support that claim.

Verdict:

Overall, the whopping 1 TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac is one of the nicest and fasted hard drives I’ve tested.  It’s nice appearance and design makes it a perfect companion to my iMac, and for  $189, it is a drive that most people will enjoy. My only wish is that Seagate makes the stand removable.