Seagate Freeagent Desk 1.5TB review

The design of Seagate’s desktop USB2 hard disks hasn’t changed much in the past few years, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The grey and white, slender, tapered appearance of the 1.5GB Freeagent Desk makes it an attractive addition to almost any desk.

The swirly pattern on the front of this external hard drive doubles as an activity indicator light and certainly looks distinctive. A snap-on stand allows it to be placed on your desk vertically, but it feels a little flimsy and cheap.

Unusually for a desktop disk, the Freeagent uses a mini USB cable instead of a larger, standard-size USB cable. It’s not a major gripe though, since mini USB cables are widely available if you ever need a replacement. The Freeagent is backed by a long five-year warranty, although you’ll need to send the disk back to the manufacturer as with all other external hard disks.

Bundled with the Freeagent is Seagate’s own Manager backup software. It can backup your files automatically according to a schedule. If you’re paranoid about data security, you can encrypt your backups, too. Manager saves time by only backing up modified files and can optionally keep older versions of your files just in case you need them.

There weren’t any surprises in our file copying benchmarks. Large files were transferred at an average speed of around 29MB/s which is fast. It was a touch slower than we expected when transferring small files though, writing them at 22.7MB/s and reading them at 19.4MB/s. We’ve seen faster USB2 desktop disks.

At just over £100, or 7p per gigabyte, the Seagate Freeagent Desk is a great value desktop USB2 hard disk. It’s better value than most 1TB USB2 disks since it costs only £20 more or so than those models. Plus it’s also a good budget option if you can’t quite afford an even bigger 2TB model. Unless you need more storage or a faster interface, this is a great choice and wins a Best Buy award.