The 500 GB FreeAgent GoFlex

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500 GB portable hard disk drive is available in four colours - black, silver, blue and red. Whatever the colour is, the top and sides have a glossy finish, with a matte finish on the underside.

The drive itself is barely larger than a standard 2.5" hard disk drive, and is light at just 150 g. This is due to the fact that the drive is basically just an enclosure for the 2.5" hard disk drive inside. The SATA-to-USB adaptor is not part of the drive. We will delve into that later.

Usable Capacity

This Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive has an official formatted capacity of 500 GB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Windows Vista.

The actual formatted capacity was 500,105,216,000 bytes. This is slightly (105 MB) more than the official formatted capacity. With about 109 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly below 500 GB.

The FreeAgent GoFlex drive actually comes with a suite of backup and encryption software (for Windows and Mac) stored inside. The software takes up about 240 MB of space. Seagate does not allow any downloading of the software, so even if you don't use it, it would be a good idea to store a copy elsewhere.

Let's take a look at its specifications.

Specifications

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