Post-Consumption Glow

I am not given to declarations of consumer affiliation (subliminal: buy !) But last year I [waxed rhapsodic](http://tleaves.com/2007/10/30/backing- up-998532-files/) about Seagate’s FreeAgent Pro external drives, and tonight, well, I’m going to do it again. I needed more storage, and I couldn’t quite convince myself to shell out the cash for a Drobo storage robot (mostly because I was afraid it would be loud) so instead I just bought another FreeAgent. Specifically, I picked up the 1 Terabyte model

Every good thing I said about the 750 Gb model holds true for the 1 Tb. It is perfectly quiet. I can’t hear it unless I put my ear up to it. In some ways, it’s even better. They toned down the manically happy packaging to a purely functional level. The firewire interface, which used to come in a sort of offboard daughtercard that needed to be swapped out with a screwdriver, is now built in: the unit comes out of the box able to do USB or Firewire 400 with either full-size or mini-connectors. It also comes with both Firewire and USB cables, so no panicked trips to Fry’s or Best Buy for the cable you forgot are necessary.

They’re little, they’re quiet, they work great, and I sort of dig the orange light (which you can turn off with a Seagate-provided utility if it bugs you). I’ve heard through the grape vine that this model is soon to be discontinued, so buy five copies of these, per the consumer rule, before they mess it up.

(OK, actually, buying 5 of any disk drive, given the rate at which storage technology advances, is probably not a winning strategy. But I’ve noticed that even with all my 21st century space-age-au-go-go applications, like HD video editing, 1 terabyte feels a lot “bigger” to me, in terms of my storage needs, than 1 gigabyte felt when the first gigabyte drives were released.)