Seagate FreeAgent Go vs. WD My Passport Essential

[Dieselman]

So here is my story. I was running out of room with my older Seagte FreeAgent external drive,plus it was getting old. So I wanted to buy a 500GB portable drive to replace it. I went to Bestbuy and looked around. It was a choice between the Seagate FreeAgent Go or the WD My Passport Essentials. Well since my Dell laptop has a WD internal drive I went with WD portable drive. Thats where I messed up. So I got home and plugged in my new WD portable. Windows did not see it which is normal. I formatted the drive and presto. Now I have a new CD drive and a new portable hard drive under My Computer. The new CD drive was to install the WD software. So I installed the software and thats when all hell broke loose. The software told me that there was no WD My Passport attached to this pc when clearly Windows should it was. So I needed to download the latest software and firmware from the WD site. Once that was done I was up and running............but so were my laptop fans. My laptop was going crazy after installing and running the software. After a bit it calmed down. I performed a back up using the WD software. Well the WD Smartware software doesn't even let you pick which files and folders to back up nor can you edit them. So I backed up anyways then figured I would also use Windows 7 backup. In the mean time my laptop fans were spinning and my laptop was crawling. I opened up Process Explorer to find that the WD services and Smartware were eating my cpu and ram alive. All 4 WD exe's where using up a total of ! GIG of ram. I was like ........................WOW. Once the back was complete I decided to trim the fat from the WD software. I stopped Smartware from running all the time and set both services to manual. Upon reboot Windows did not see the drive. So I turned on both services and refreshed the drives. Now the drive is active but so are my laptop fans. I opened up Process Explorer again and found that one WD service was using 20,000K and the other was using 200,000K. yes I said 200,000K. I said the heck with this and wiped the drive clean and unplugged it.


The next day I went back to Bestbuy and exchanged the WD My Passport for the Seagate FreeAgent Go. Both were the same price anyways. I got home and plugged in the drive. Windows did not recognize it which is normal. I formatted the drive and now I had just one new portable hard drive labeled " FreeAgent D". I then went into the drive and installed the software. That was very easy. The software told me to download a new version which I did and then it was all set. My laptop's ram and cpu were normal. I opened up Seagate Manager software and select ALL the files and folders I wanted to back up which included my Son's stuff. Backup went fine and I closed out Seagate Manager. I opened up Process Explorer and found only 1 service running to keep my FreeAgent Go running. That service was only using 7,200K. When I opened up Seagate Manager that process was using 12,000K. I was so thrilled. Sorry for the long article but I wanted to share my experience with you so all of you member's know which portable drive to purchase and which one to avoid. Kudos to Seagate. Here is the link to the Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB Portable drive I bought from Bestbuy.

Bestbuy

[pranaygtr]

I didn't realise that portable/external HDDs came with software...

Anyways, I would have voted Seagate, even before I read your "experience" story.

[Dieselman]

All external drives come with preinstalled software. I just used the free version of Paragon Backup and Recovery to backup my entire laptop drive. Transfer rate was good even through USB 2.0. I backed up 100 gigs in about an 45 minutes or so. I am really disappointed in WD.

[pranaygtr]

Not quite, my external HDD didn't come with any software, but this was quite a few years ago...

[Dieselman]

What kind? My 4 year old Seagate FreeAgent came with preinstalled software.

[pranaygtr]

The older 320GB of this.

[Dieselman]

Toshiba......................LOL. No wonder why. I wouldn't use or trust a name like Toshiba when it comes to HDD. The HDD world belongs to Seagate or Western Digital.

[pranaygtr]

However, it uses a WD HDD.

[Dieselman]

Another big factor in deciding which drive to go with was :

Western Digital My Passport Essentials Warranty = 2 yr

Seagate FreeAgent Go Warranty = 5 yr.

[jamesste2k7]

sorry to say i never install any of that stuff they give you id rather use my own personal backup solution silly idea using the included software not stable or very customizable