Seagate FreeAgent Go vs. WD My Passport Essential

[hemingway60]

Slightly off-topic
Whats the average life span of portable drives? I wanted to buy one but I was warned that most of them tend to malfunction in 6-12 months... Is this statement true?

[Dieselman]

Completely false..............Plus Seagate has a 5 year warranty.

[bogdan]

Google did some studies on HDDs and the result was that if a drive fails it is most likely to happen during the first year (LINK). Probably this is what you heard.

[Dieselman]

The only way I can see the drive failing is by leaving it plugged in all the time. A portable hard drive has no cooling so over a period of time it may get to hot which can cause premature wear and tear. I myself always unplug mine. I only plug it in to perform a backup. Once I am done I unplug it.

[jamescv7]

Well overheating is the main problem why HDD are easily destroyed.

[adzhar432]

And it's a waste of energy to leave portable HD.Be green for the environment

[fasteddy2020]

BTW people the software cannot be removed and is not suppose to be removed so you can plug it into any pc and share files.

This is not true. I erase the worthless software on all my Seagate FreeAgent Go drives. I have 5. The software is not necessary to share files. It will act like a USB drive when plugged into various computers. I also wipe and reformat the drives. This is my preference.


Seagate is definitely the better of the two.

[TheSctt]

I vote wd. My wd drive is TOUGH. i have dropped it 5 times on tree roots because it fell out of the box. And my software that came with drive only uses 3 megs of ram.

[Dieselman]

Is your external drive portable from WD? Do you have a WD My Passport Essential? If not then this is not what I am discussing. Also the software wasn't exactly entire problem. Its was the services. I highly doubt that all 3-4 services your WD runs uses only 3 megs.