Strengths: Great Product! Cost Effective.... Also comes with usb 2.0 and esata. Transfer speeds with usb seem to be faster then my other drives. 5 year warranty

Weaknesses: Gets fairly hot. Seagate should put in a small fan to get the heat out. I wished the would have included a Esata cable

Summary: I have this drive hooked up to my HTPC Thru usb 2.0 and it seems to be working great. I have had problems with another seagate 200gb drive corrupting video from writing to the drive constantly. I was kinda weary about buying another Seagate and having the same problem. But this drive has been working like a champ.

Strengths: Stylish, quiet, big storage, and 5-year warranty!

Weaknesses: No e-sata cable included.

Summary: Seagate is currently the best in industry to offer 5-year warranty on almost all its harddrive products, and their 7200rpm drives is simply the best! Fast and quiet, with glowing orange light thrusting through the dark...I could leave it just with the AC plug, and it'll turn itself off. While plugging the cable into the PCs, it'll start by itself. Very good feature!

Strengths: Quiet, physical size, warranty

Weaknesses: heat, power switch

Summary: I had bought the 750 GB version of this drive and had no problems with it so when I needed a way to move large files netween non networked computers and I saw this drive on sale I bought it. I found that this 500 gb version of the FreeAgent Pro runs hotter than the 750 gb version. The lack of a fan which makes the drive quiet is more of a concern here because of the extra heat. The plastic case doesn't seem to conduct heat as well as the metal case used by other Free Agent drives. Using the ESata port is much faster than using the USB port but only one of the computers has a ESata card while every computer has a USB port. The small size makes it portable and easy to move between computers. Documentation is on the drive itself which is formatted in NTFS so if you want to access it with a Windows 98 or ME machine you are out of luck. I like this drive but not as much as its 750 gb big brother.

Strengths: Good price for storage size. Very small foot print

Weaknesses: Firmware need to be updated in order to transfer at a faster rate with SATA

Summary: Although this drive runs at 7200 RPM's, it's very slow in copying files, running backups, or using diagnoctic tools for optimization of my primary drive. Although USB 2.0 is 480 mbs and Firewire is 400 mbs, Firewire is much quicker. I copied 7GB from my primary drive to this drive and it took just over 7 minutes.

Strengths: Quiet, powerful, light weight.

Weaknesses: Ugly

Summary: I got this unit from circuit city when it was on sale. I have been using this for more than one week. Generally speaking, I like it because I used it to backup a huge number of data files. It was fairly easy to be set up.This unit is very quiet, unlike my old 200g Maxtor which is really noisy. Even though there is a lot of heat generated, the fan works quietly to blow it out. Although the drive is a little bit big, I was not bothered too much to carry it around from home to work. I kept that in my backpack without a problem along with a lot of other junk stuff. The light weight makes it more portable.The only thing I don't like is the design. Some folks said it looks cute. I think the Seagate engineers should learn something from the Samsung Korean guys of how to make the design stylish.

Strengths: Quality and reputation

Weaknesses: Capacity is slightly less than advertised due to a difference definition of a GB (shouldn

Summary: The hard drive looks very stylish on the desk in my living room but that yellow light... I would not want it in my bedroom. Overall, however, I am quite satisfied with the drive which I bought it for storage and backups (did not try the latter yet).

Strengths: it glows??

Weaknesses: does not really support Apple computers

Summary: I bought this because of the price and good reviews and THE FIVE-YEAR WARRANTY...but the good thing is - I bought it at Costco. Seagate does not accept returns but Costo does! Phew! Their tech support.The machine has to be unplugged if not in use because it turns on by ityself and it really heats up bad. I had installed it the night before and formatted it and left it at that. I was away the whole day the following day and when I got back, there it was, glowing in the dark like a scene from a sci-fi movie! And hot! So I don't know how long it was running. It comes with bundled software and one of them was supposed to take care of this but this doesn't work with Macs.Seagate tech support doesn't know Apple computers. The guy gave me the runaround, and oh did I tell you - you can't return it?They also advised me not to work beyond the normal 8-hour day. It's not built pull all nighters! So, if you're someone who'd like to leave the computer running for back-ups and stuff, this is not for you.

Strengths: Good looks, good "feel" ; the backup software if it works as billed. 5 year warranty - scarce for an external drive.

Weaknesses: The software is pre-installed on the drive itself.

Summary: I don't know who did the industrial design work on this device, but it may have well been Porsche. I'm basically a nuts and bolts guy, but the looks and feel of this guy are awesome. I was looking for an external that was set up to pack up 3-5 pcs on my network and it sounded as though this had this facility: I've not had a chance to fully test that yet, but reviews for it seemed overwhelmingly positive. But there is no good reason to have their software preinstalled on the hard drive, I'd much prefer to set it up the traditional way from cd rom.

Strengths: Sexy Slim design, Future Proof(eSATA interface), Faster transfer rate compare to USB 2.0, Good example of, "Bang for your buck!" Plug and play, can't be easier than that.

Weaknesses: eSATA cable not included.

Summary: This is an upgrade from my 4 year old WD 80GIG external HD. What a difference in File transfer rate and access time. Not to mention the capacity. This should last me a good 5 years before the next upgrade. The main reason I settled with SEAGATE is because of this review: "http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40689." This link sums it all up.

Strengths: eSata USB2.0; looks cool; Small desktop footprint; 5-year warranty

Weaknesses: No eSata cable included!

Summary: I was looking for an external hard drive that supported both eSata and USB. I'd be doing backups to the drive via eSata, yet utilizing the drive for MP3s DVDs via USB. This drive did this, in spades. Writing was extremely fast! It took probabaly 1/2 the time to write 300GB that it did for USB. My Windows XP Media Center recognized it right away when plugged in via USB or eSata. It came preformatted with NTFS, which I liked. Previous external drives were in FAT32. Great capacity, and an awesome 5-year warranty. Only knock I can give it is the lack of an eSATA cable!! Spend all this money, and at least they can supply this. The cable cost me less than $10, but it was the hassle of finding it, making sure it was the right one (eSata and not Sata connector), and waiting for it to arrive. Shame on Seagate for going cheap this way. ;-( That's the only reason I give it 4-stars.