Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB USB 2.0 / eSATA 3.5″ External Hard Drive ST307504FPA1E2-RK

Pros: I got Two of the 750 drives from newegg and one is the 3 connection one and thats a pritty cool switch out plate for the FireWire 400.
I have been Using them every day as I have put all my dvds on them and watch them from the drive so there is a lot of use of the drive. I have had no problems at all with them.

Cons: none with the drives and PLEASE READ my other thoughts below

Overall Review: What I can’t understand is people giving poor ratings for a bad SATA connection when it’s the fault of a after market cable not the drive’s problem and hot to the touch burning fingers “come on get real here” (warm yes) and that’s to be expected. And the unable to turn it off
‘Da did you try the switch”
If you read the reviews like I do I hope you put Blame where it belongs and not discredit a product do to fault of another product or person that has no idea of what he or she is talking about. If you disregard all the reviews that have nothing to do with the drive itself you will see that in reality it have a very good review.

Pros: I have 4 of the Seagate FreeAgent Pro’s and have had no problems what is ever.
There all the 750GB and I use the eSATA on all of them. The on and off switch works just fine and I think it’s pretty cool how Seagate did it to the touch. I use then every day and so far not a single problem

Cons: none “I use good cables”

Pros: Great storage space, low power consumption. Auto spin-down is nice also.

Cons: Pretty much turns into an orange glow emitting brick if you try to use eSATA with solaris. Works fine with a usb connection however.

Overall Review: If you plan on using usb only and need a ton of storage, this may be the drive for you. If you want the speed of eSATA, look elsewhere.

Pros: The HDD runs quietly and well to the best of my knowledge so far. Time will tell.

Cons: None yet.

Pros: Full 750 gigs, fast, works, looks good, cheap, eSATA as well.
I did not lose data (yet).
If there are heatsinks and software is free, I will give 5 stars.

Cons: Overheats. After getting a little airflow under the device, the drive stops turning off for no reason. You need to pay extra for the software, I didn’t bother. I found some free sync programs online.

Overall Review: The On button is strange. Not sure when/if it works. Seems to better after I got some airflow. I don’t know if the inner connection is ATA or sATA ?

Pros: The product is well-priced (cheaper than buying an enclosure, hard drive and Memeo software). The USB port works well and the utilities provided are nice.

Cons: The eSATA port is very unreliable. The computer would freeze while seeming to wait for the eSATA buffer to clear. Performance was terrible using eSATA. Since that was the whole point of purchasing the drive, I returned it. No eSATA cable is included with the unit.

Overall Review: I would have given this a much lower score since the eSATA port was such a poor performer. However, I tried to be fair. In the end, I purchased a WiebeTech enclosure and a Seagate drive. It works great.

Pros: Big, pretty fast when it worked.

Cons: When transfering files using eSATA it would crash the video driver, momentarily hard lock the system, and cause any audio playing to skip. I figured it was 1st gen tech so it would have some problems. About 2 weeks ago it catasrophically failed corrupting a bunch of indexes, the MBR, and MFT. After hours of work I was able to get it working again, but then came the heat problems. It ran hot before, but never seemed to affect anything and figuring seagate had passed it through QA it should be fine. I was very wrong because after about 20 minutes of operation it would be unreadable until I let it cool down. Also it was nigh impossible to transfer anything to it or from it.

Overall Review: I loved my 7200.9 320 internal drive, so I figured I’d give this drive a try. I’ve heard bad things about external drives and now I will never buy another. I think I’ll just get an internal and use it externally.

Pros: Attractive case. Runs quiet and cool. Inexpensive.

Cons: Power “switch” (actually a touch-sensitive spot on the base) behaves erratically. Has a spin down issue on Linux systems (see below).

Overall Review: There is a problem with the Seagate FreeAgent drives on some Linux systems: by default, the drive is set to spin down after 15 minutes of idling. When the system asks the drive to spin back up, it does not respond quickly enough, errors out and, gets re-mounted read-only. It is possible to set the drive to never spin down (with sdparm) though, that may cause other problems. Some (but not all) systems can be set to allow the drive more time to restart. None of these work-arounds are needed with competing USB drives from other manufacturers.