Sea-great

Introduction

 
The market is crammed with USB drives. The world and his dog are churning them out. A quick squint on eBuyer shows over 100 different drives for sale at this moment from a 160Gb one for £40 all the way up to a 2Tb one for £240.
 
Somewhere in the middle you have the FreeAgent Go 320 GB, which retails at £80, but you can find it for around £65 online. It's 8cm wide, 13cm high and 1.3cm deep - around the same as an iPhone - so it will easily fit in pockets, bags and the like. It has a spindle speed of 5400rpm and a claimed data transfer rate of 480Mbps.

 

Set Up

 
Once you've managed to hack your way in to the evil plastic packaging, as with all good USB devices it's a doddle. Plug it in, give it a minute or so to be recognised. And you're ready to go.
 
You can also install the optional Seagate Manager software (which is ready to be installed from the drive, no CD required). It's not required if you are just using this like any piece of portable storage, but it has some nice features that you may be interested in.
 
You can set up an encrypted folder (password protected) and drop files into that. You'll then need the password to get the files out again. It's not exactly BS7799 or ISO/IEC 27002, but if you have some vaguely sensitive information that you want to leave on a train, in a skip, in a taxi or wherever, at least it's a bit harder for newspapers to read your data and find out your secrets.
 
There are 2 other options available, "Sync" and "Backup". Sync allows you to synchronise a specific folder or set of folders onto the drive. You can have this automated or perform it as a manual process.
 
There is also the Backup option which you can also customise. You can request that it performs a backup of your files and folders at certain times and on certain days. This is probably a very good thing for most users since "forgetting to back up" is a common complaint. As long as you've set it up and plugged it in, this little drive will back up all of your files for you. 
 
You can also tinker with a few settings on the drive using the Manager software. You can run a drive test (doesn't affect your data). You can check for software updates (my drive updated as soon as the software had installed - this is pretty common nowadays with so many updates being released). And you can also change the power settings (how much inactivity until the drive powers down) and also what the LED display does- there's a "starry sky" style pattern of LEDs that look a bit MacBook-ish. These can be turned off, or they will pulsate gently when there's any activity.

 

Use

 
It's another drive on your computer, so you can just drag and drop stuff around as usual, or use the Seagate Manager software to copy stuff around. It's all very easy to use and pretty quick.
 
As a test I transferred around 50Gb of music, documents and photos in just under an hour, a transfer rate of around 15Mb per second. Under the right conditions it will probably do around 20-25Mb per second. It's all good performance from a pocket sized USB drive.

Conclusion

 
Do you need an external USB drive? Chances are that nowadays you probably do. With photos, videos and audio all being increasingly stored in electronic form, you're always going to need some more space. Or you'll want to take a back up of all those treasured memories in those photos, videos and music files that you spent weeks digitising from your 1,000+ CD collection that's now in storage in the loft.
 
It's small, it's light, it fits in your pocket. It looks very classy (the silver unit I have here is very similar to those shiny and trendy MacBooks, particularly the glowing white lights). You can take it anywhere. You don't need a power cable as it's powered from USB.
 
You can also purchase a separate "Go Dock" which is quite like an iPod dock - this allows you to mount the drive vertically, and it comes with a sleek carrying case. You don't really need it, but it's a nice addition if you want to buy it.
 
This is a cracking little piece of hardware at a very good price. And if you buy one now, you can download an exclusive hour long package of short films from seagateactive.com/film