A Closer Look

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1.5 TB portable hard disk drive has a sleek, minimalistic design with a single Seagate logo adorning the glossy top facade. The underside though has a matte texture with a label that lists the drive model, storage capacity, parts and serial numbers as well as country of manufacture.

Unlike regular USB hard disk drives, the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive itself does not contain the requisite SATA-to-USB adaptor. As you can see in the picture below, the drive has a standard SATA power and data interface. Seagate designed the case to prevent you from directly attaching the standard SATA power and data cables to it, but barring that limitation, there is no reason why you cannot connect this drive to your computer using standard SATA cables.

This drive comes with a separate SATA-to-USB 3.0 adaptor which plugs into the SATA connector at the bottom of the drive. The USB cable can actually be detached from the adaptor. Seagate claims that the attached USB cable is 18" in length, but we found that they included the length of the USB connectors as well as the SATA-to-USB 3.0 adaptor. The actual length of the USB cable is 36 cm, or just over 14 inches.

Although it may seem like a convoluted way to connect the FreeAgent GoFlex drive to your computer, it is actually a pretty neat system. The separate adaptor allows it to be used with other FreeAgent GoFlex drives, which means you can buy cheaper standalone FreeAgent GoFlex drives to expand your storage capacity. Just disconnect one drive from the adaptor and insert another drive. It's that easy.

This system also allows you to swap out the default USB 3.0 adaptor for other adaptors, e.g. eSATA or FireWire. While USB 3.0 is very fast, not many computers support it right now, which means the USB 3.0 adaptor will fallback to the much slower USB 2.0 standard.

If you wish to use this drive with a computer that does not support USB 3.0 and yet want a much faster interface, then all you have to do is swap the default USB 3.0 adaptor with an eSATA or a FireWire adaptor. This will greatly improve the drive's throughput with older computers and when you upgrade to a computer that supports USB 3.0, all you have to do is swap out the eSATA or FireWire adaptor with the USB 3.0 adaptor.

This ability to upgrade the interface of portable hard disk drives is a key advantage of the Seagate GoFlex system.

Usable Capacity

This Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive has an official formatted capacity of 1.5 TB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Windows Vista.

The actual formatted capacity was 1,500,299,390,976 bytes. This is slightly (299 MB) more than the official formatted capacity. With about 140 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly above 1.5 TB.

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.

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