Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive ST905003FAA2E1-RK (Black)

Great Drive. Small, slim, and aesthetically pleasing. Simple to use and format the unnecessary files included in the drive, which is an issue with the Western Digital My Passport. Lots of people have commented on how they like the lights of the drive. The silver and black one compliment the Macbook Pro nicely.I'm using the drive on a Macbook Pro and Playstation 3. It was formatted 2/3 Fat32 for the Playstation and 1/3 Mac format (HFS+) for use with time machine. Works flawlessly on both devices. No issues so far. Speed isn't bad, no lag when watching movies straight from the drive. Don't let the negative reviews deter you, hard drives are fragile so yes some will arrive dead and some will die within a couple months. Regardless of the manufacturer hard drives fail, its a fact. That is why it is important to backup your backup. Spending $170 on two drives is much better than spending up to a $1000 to recover data from a hard drive that has failed. If it ever were to fail Seagate's 5 year warranty is definitely a reason to purchase this over its competitors. The Western Digital equivalent which comes with a 2 year warranty is almost disrespectful to the consumer. If I purchase any product I want the manufacturer to stand behind it. Very happy overall with the purchase, I've also had the old freeagent (non "go" version) for years and it's still running great.Purchased the 640GB and its socking to see they have raised the price by over $20, I thought electronics drop in price with time not increase. I would have purchased another one already if that wasn't the case.

For any of you out there who are trying to figure out if this will work with your Mac, I have an answer for you. Yes, yes it will. The second thing you're probably wondering is, will this work for a long time and not die, leaving me stranded without any of my important files. (Yes, it's happened to all of us at one point or another. Let's face it, its one of the scarier parts of using an external hard drive.) Well, I've been using this puppy for well over 2 years now, close to 3 actually. Constant use, mind you. I have all of my music files here, together with pictures, work projects, scanned documents archives... you name it. Anything I don't want to clutter my computer with, but still have handy on a daily basis is here. Most of the time, it travels with me. It goes, pretty much, everywhere my laptop goes. It's plugged in 99% of the time, and has taken quite a bit of abuse because of it. My dog has knocked it onto the floor, its been dropped, little kids have pulled it off the USB cord out of curiosity, it's been used as an emergency mouse-pad, and all manner of things that never should be done to an external drive. Even with all the abuse, it still looks great, works great, and I only had my first hiccup just today. Not a big deal, since I keep a second Seagate (1 TB) drive handy with a backup copy of everything. The drive itself was perfectly fine, but some of the files became corrupted. I restored the backup, and things are just peachy.End of story: I LOVE my Seagate drive. If it ever dies (which is looking less and less likely) I'll probably just end up buying a new one exactly like it. I hope you have as much success with yours as I have had with mine. =)

Not much for review writing, but I love these drives. I have five of them so far plan to get a few more and thought I would share how I use them and why.The reason I have so many is that I have so many computers, a main desktop, a portable laptop, a media center laptop and a sever with 9TB so far. These Free Agent Gos are great for a couple of reasons: small, portable, match my set up, can get in different colors (but often times hard to find the colors you want), relatively cheap for my uses. The DOCK is great and a must have if you move these drives between computers allot (but it does need 2 USB slots closes to each other for the dock) or swap out drives for different purposes (like a movie drive and a music drive). I have two docks, one for main and one for media center PC attached to the TV. The dock makes it easy to pop one drive out and another in without running a USB cable down to my hub under the desk or to the back of the media center PC in that mess of wires I try to hide back there.I have a bunch of data on my sever, movies, music, TV shows, home movies, archive Word files and stuff like that. I use one drive in the dock at all times backing up important data every couple of hours on my main Desktop as well. This is just critical stuff like word docks, OneNote notebooks and my outlook.pst file (note - to do this I set the Free Agent Dock on my main up with a permanent drive letter. This causes some issues at boot up since the computer tries to boot to that drive and freezes. I think an easy fix is just to change the boot settings in the BIOS, but since I don't turn off my main computer much I have not gotten around to doing it yet, but this should solve the problem. The lazy man's version is just pop the drive out of the dock before reboot. Also note - this does NOT happen if its a dynamic drive, i.e. if you just let Windows assign it a drive letter at boot up, so for most users this won't even be a an issue, but when you have several USB drives always attached to your computer like me and want the Free Agent Go to have the same drive letter each time it boots -like so your backup software always backups to that drive letter ONLY- then you can run into the issue I described above, but like I said should be simple to fix in BIOS, and for most users this won't even come up).So I have one always connected Free Agent Go doing backups every hour. Then I have another one for weekly offline backups. I plug this one in every Sunday, run a larger backup then un dock it and keep it in my safe. This way if I get a critical failure like a virus that wipes all attached drives, this one is not connected except when its backing up, so should be somewhat failsafe (along with a second thumb drive I do the same thing with and keep in a different location as well as online and NAS drives, redundancy is the key folks).For the rest of the Free Agents each has a special duty. I like to put all my DVDs, CDs, and Blu-Rays on my computer because I have to many disks and not enough storage to display them, plus you avoid scratches and such this way and can play them on any computer I have even if it does not have a Blu-Ray drive. One has all my DVD rips on it. Another is for Blu-Ray Rips (wish I could find a blue colored 500g one in stock!). Another all my music files. While I have a home server as well, wireless streaming to my makeshift media center laptop is hit or miss depending on the weather, what my neighbors are doing, if I'm on my cordless and it seems the internet gods. Running an Ethernet down 3 stories in a house built in 1885 is not something I really want to deal with this year, so its wireless and up to the connection speed at this point.So while I will sometimes stream movies from the server, I've found the Free Agent Gos with a dock on the media center laptop is a great alternative. Just grab the Blu-Ray drive, upload any new movies to it since last time from my main or sever (this can take a while when you're talking 20gigs per movie, so I usually update those overnight). Take it down stairs and plug it into the Free Agent dock on the laptop and play the movies from there. Do the same with DVDs or music or pictures or whatever. Mostly I use it for HD stuff though, because non HD streams OK most of the time.If you can't find different colors for drives (all but one of mine are black right now) then I have found using a label maker and putting a label on the back works well. Like "Blu-Ray" movies, "Music," "Offline Backup," "Shuttle Drive" ect. I also put the capacity, like "500g" on there since it's often hard to read the fine print on the drive where it states its capacity. (Again it would be nice to have a rainbow of colors so I could just spot the one I needed in a drawer, but it's hard to find the colors you want in stock at Amazon prices). Finally I keep a word doc change log on the drives as well where I update anything I have added or deleted. Like 3/25/10 added Blu-Ray XXXX, moved Blu-Ray YYYY back to server. This is just so I can glance at it in case I forget what's on there and what is not without look at each file name.I've tried doing this with WD drives as well and they work fine, but with the dock and the Free Agent Go's styling I really prefer the Free Agent Gos. It's also great that the Free Agent Go drives have lights on the front, a quick glance and you know its doing something when they are fading in and out. I have relegated my older WD drives to "loner" drives I give my friends or co-wokers to transfer large amounts of data without eating up my ISP bandwidth (again good idea to put a label on these as well, along with your name or initials so you know you get the right drive back!)But just a word of caution, like all hard drives, sometimes these can go out (although that has not happened yet so far) so best practices is to keep copies of anything you put on the drive on another drive, back up often, use redundancy on your backups and keep at LEAST one copy offline in a safe place (or online storage). Remember disasters do happen, fires, floods, break-ins, so if you can, keep a backup of any mission critical data offsite (like at work, or swap drives with a friend you see often). That way if they do ever go out, or you lose everything then you can just move that data to a new Free Agent Go and be back up and running.

No instructionsIncorrect usb cord- had to get a correct oneCharger included was not needed for this hard drive

From the moment I received this hard drive it did not work. The computer would not recognize the device. I have tried it on several computers. Waste of money!