Perhaps it’s a sign of their ubiquity, but the design of external hard drive cases has been steadily getting better over the years. The Freeagent Pro is possibly the best looking one we’ve seen.

It’s functional too. In the base of the unit is an interchangeable base plate that provides either an eSATA and Mini-USB or a Firewire 400 interface. The eSATA interface permits the motherboard into which it is plugged directly control the drive, making for faster transfer speeds and more control from within the BIOS. The other interfaces incur a slight transfer speed penalty when in use, but in practice it’s barely noticeable.

The vertically mounted drive has no active cooling which keeps the drive quiet. Vents at the base provided adequate airflow for days of torturous use as a video editing drive shared being constantly accessed through a gigabit network by four computers. There is no visual feedback to indicate when the drive is in use; however power is indicated with the orange illumination of a large strip of the case. The touch sensitive power button takes more time than you’d expect to start the drive, but this is of little concern.

We tested the 750GB model, although 500 and 320 GB versions are available. Preloaded on the drive are a selection of Seagate backup tools, diagnostic utilities and the instruction manual in PDF form. Should you wipe the drive, the tools are downloadable from Seagate’s web site, and versions that ship without the FireWire 400 interface base plate are available for $20 less.