Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The pluses: It's light and small, easy to use, and comes preloaded with a document backup utility. Should be great for those who need a portable HDD as it can be dropped in a purse or slipped into a shirt pocket for transport. Decent copying speed for an external USB drive. The negatives: There seems to be a major reliability problem with some of the hard drives (note similar recent reviews of failure at Amazon). Mine died after only 7 months of use on a personal computer. It was never jostled around or subjected to extreme temps as it never left my desktop after it was plugged in. Several utilities were unable to recover any data due to "unreadable sectors" and Master File Table errors -- quite likely physical damage to the head or platters. I managed to save about 20 out of 200+ GB before the unit went totally south. Seagate warranties the drive for 5 years, but it's a whole lot of no fun trying to navigate their cold, impersonal website. It took several tries at their site to get the correct model name entered without being rejected as invalid. Their warranty terms are full of warnings and dire threats of legal action in case you try to defraud them. They do NOT pay for shipping the defective product to their facility (actually a warehouse in Texas used by a number of corporations for return items). They insist you pack the dead HDD, USB cord, and manual in the original package or a corrugated cardboard box surrounded by 2 inches of foam with the unit inside an ESD package. They will be happy to sell those to you for a mere $19.99. I normally keep original packaging, but it was one of those plastic jobs that practically requires a hacksaw to extract the product from, so it was trashed. I was able to scrounge up the foam and an ESD bag from previously purchased items. Seagate will be glad to try and retrieve your lost data for a small fortune. They do not send you a new drive, but a "remanufactured" one. The box I received had very large lettering printed on top (underneath the shipping label) warning me to treat the fragile device with great care (as though I were somehow responsible for their poor quality control and defective product). Oh, and they didn't pack the HDD in an ESD bag. On the bright side, I do have a nice box and foam in which to return my brand new remanufactured HDD when it dies. I have a five-year-old 120 GB Seagate Barracuda internal HDD that still runs like a champ. I bought the FreeAgent Go because I thought I could depend on Seagate for it's reliability. Judging from my experience with this hard drive, the company seems to have gone downhill quality-wise.