Like Buffalo, Seagate has redesigned its portable offering this summer, and the result is a huge improvement. Gone, at last, is the squat brown casing of old, replaced by a clean, super-slim design in a range of rich colours, with impressive names to match.
Who wouldn't want a Tuxedo Black drive, or one in a commandingly Royal Blue. A bright white luminescence glows up through pinhole openings at the rear of the case.
The new range goes up to 500GB, and as we've seen with Seagate drives in previous hard disk tests, that gets you an excellent value proposition. On a per-gigabyte basis, it's in fact the cheapest per gigabyte, pipping the HP SimpleSave for the honour.
Although hard disks are Seagate's core business, its external devices haven't always impressed us with their performance, and the FreeAgent Go is no different, achieving below-average scores in every one of our tests.
As usual, though, the gap wasn't horrendous: in the 3000-file write test the Seagate kept us waiting for six seconds longer than the leaders, and ten seconds in the 3GB read test.
The drive comes with Seagate's own backup, synchronisation and encryption suite, and although you don't get any other treats to speak of, the drive is covered by a five-year warranty, which is far longer than other manufacturers offer. That isn't as great as it may sound, though, as inevitably it covers only the drive and not the data on it.
Still, while the FreeAgent Go doesn't make it into our top rank in terms of value or speed, it's a very welcome change to be able to call it an aesthetically attractive option.
