With the rise of 'digital entertainment', the amount of data in the form of
photos, music, movies etc that a user saves everyday has increased drastically
and so have storage requirements. FreeAgent Extreme from Seagate has a compact
design with jazzy light effects and can be kept both horizontally or vertically
depending on the space available. Under the sleek black color casing of this
product is placed a shock absorbing mechanism that can easily be felt while
moving around the device, when in use; thereby protecting data from perilous
effects of jerks. The external drive is also extremely silent and emits
negligible heat while in operation. The Xtreme provides users with three
interface options: USB 2.0, FireWire and e-SATA for lightning fast transfers
between itself and the computer but one has to shell out extra money for the e-SATA
cable as it is not shipped with the product. It also comes with software which
lets one control the time after which the drive goes into sleep mode, creates
backups and also has security features such as file encryption. We tested the
drive on an AMD Athlon X2 dual core processor based machine with 2GB DDR2 RAM
using HD Tach, WinBench99 and Everest benchmarks. The avg read speed with HD
Tach was 46.1MB/sec which is quite good as compared to other external HDDs we
reviewed in past. It managed to get 14.8 and 34.1 MBps on the Business disk and
high-end disk tests respectively on the WinBench99 benchmark. The avg access
speeds were around 13.2 ms.
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Bottom Line: This drive is not just an artist's delight but also high
on performance and features.