Of Seagate's new Freeagent range of external hard drives, the Go is the smallest. We're looking at the 160GB model, which gets ten points for style purely because of the amount of comments it attracted from onlookers. A panel throbs with a soft orange glow whenever the drive is being accessed. It and the sleek and curved dark chocolate chassis look a million dollars.

Like most small external hard drives, a 2.5" laptop drive provides the heart of the operation; and like all 2.5" hard drives it requires 5 volts to operate. The Freeagent only provides power through USB, which keeps the amount of cables and complexity down. The supplied USB to USB-Mini cable breaks out into a standard USB connector and an additional power only connector which can be used if the main connector is not able to supply USB's maximum 500mA, such as some notebooks or unpowered hubs.

It comes formatted as an NTFS drive and in our HD Tach performance benchmark reached a respectable 31.5MB/s average read speed, which is normally all we would be interested in, however the Freeagent Go range include Ceedo, a portable software launcher that leaves no trace of your original work on the host machine. It works. The original copy of this review was ruined as I and pulled the USB plug out of the drive too late to remember I had been working from within the portable drive.

Ceedo is set as an autoplay application under Windows which appears as a small bar attached to the top of your start bar or the bottom of the screen (whichever comes first) and mimics the Windows XP start menu, providing links to folders and portable software installed to the drive. Unsurprisingly, Ceedo doesn't work on Macs. While we're on the subject, Mac users who want to take full advantage of the drive should be prepared to format it to something other than NTFS, or use some third party applications to access it from OS X.