Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive

Pros: The drive is enormous, physically compact, and fast. As advertised. I needed an economical LARGE drive, and this fits the bill.

Cons: As noted, this drive gets very hot. Remove it from the enclosure after it has been running for a few hours, and you will have trouble holding it in your hand.

Overall Review: I would venture a guess here: Most people using this drive who complain about its functionality with USB 2.0 are likely using Windows XP. XP has a two TB limitation on physical disks, regardless of partitioning. Seagate, through some tricky electronics, has "negated" this limitation, and XP will recognize the drive's full capacity. I question the reliability of this work-around, as I found that, on an XP system, I would *always* eventually encounter errors when writing large (>200 GB) amounts of data to the drive. This happened on multiple XP systems, but on NO Vista or W7 system. I would not recommend use of this drive on an XP system.

Pros: Very fast speed!!! Copied off 240GB off my laptop to the external drive. Less than 2:30 minutes to do so. Saw sustained (window's speed) speeds of 90 - 105 Mb/s and peak over over 150 Mb/s. Nice design and very quiet operation.

Cons: Drive takes a moment to wake up when fully sleep.

Overall Review: Big drive at a great price. USB 3.0 is super fast!!

Pros: Spacious external HDD with 3TB of storage (which is really 2.72TB but that's how HDDs are). USB 3.0 is blazing fast as I reached close to 200MB/s when transferring files to the external drive. The enclosure is pretty solid and the adapter is very innovative that allows for different adapters to attach underneath. The enclosure is warm to the touch, not burning hot. There was some software already on the HDD, but I never got prompted to install it. I just formatted the HDD as I didn't need the software and it's become my media drive for movies, music, pictures, etc.

Cons: The USB 3.0 cable that comes with it is a bit on the short side, but nothing huge to deduct an egg from the rating.

Overall Review: All around great drive. I'm a big Seagate fan and have never had a single drive failed with me - I have four 1TBs installed in my computer. I would love to see a NAS solution from Seagate that allows you to hook up two of these drives without needing to use something like Pogoplug to do it. Though you could always take the HDD out of the enclosure and put it in a NAS enclosure. The external drive is a cheaper solution to get a 3TB HDD than buying the bare drive Seagate has out now ($149.99 vs. $239.99). Running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my computer.

Pros: I bought this drive from another place but buy most of mine from NewEgg. This drive is fast, quiet, and works fine so far.

Cons: Except! It runs very hot. You won't know this from just feeling the plastic case. If you take the drive out of the case and run it continuously for 3 hours, it is very hot to the touch. Inside the case, it would be hotter than outside, but you wouldn't know due to the poor heat transfer to the plastic case. Needs a better enclosure with a fan. I use it out of the case with a fan on it now.

Overall Review: Very disappointed in the engineering on this external drive. One non-ventilated hermetically sealed plastic enclosure does not fit all drives across a product line, esp 7200 rpm drives. Long term data integrity is the question with such poor heat transfer from drive to case to environment. 5400 or 5900 rpm drives are best for external case drives unless fan equipped. I own multiple 7200 2 TB and 3TB and 5400/5900 2 TB drives from other manufacturers for comparison. This drive is the hottest running of all of these others by far.

Pros: First and foremost, the device does not run hot. I read many reviews claiming their device is running very hot to the touch. I had TrueCrypt populate the 3gig drive with random data, at consistent write speeds in approximately 12 hours, and the drive was never hot to the touch. Secondly, at no time does the drive disconnect or not turn on upon boot, check your cables and make sure they are not loose/damaged. All in all, Seagate is quality hardware (even though I have had 3 drives kr@p out on me within 1mo of ownership, but that is just egregiously bad luck).

Cons: I do not like how the cover for the hard drive is attached to the hard drive itself. It is too permanent.

Pros: I just bought this drive to use as an internal drive, since 3tb internal drives are crazy expensive right now. Upon opening it up, I found a seagate barracuda XT 7200rpm drive!! Awesome!

Cons: Kindof annoying to open up if you ever want to swap out the drive with another one..

Pros: Fast Works Great 3 TB

Cons: None

Overall Review: I have two of these drives: one USB 2 and one USB 3. They both work, and neither of them gets hot at all, despite what people seem to be reporting. The USB 3 drive is roughly five to six times faster than the USB 2 drive. It's really fast. I hooked it up to a USB 3 port without any issues, it was instantly recognized in Windows 7, and I have 2.72 TB of free space! Reads and writes just fine; no issues.

Pros: High speed USB 3.0 is great. Lots of storage to backup purposes

Cons: Included software sucks and is not in any way worth the price to upgrade to the premium version. It is a resource HOG and will slow down your system big time. It is expected that the initial backup will be slow as it builds the backup table but you never really regain your PC back as far as performance goes. I simply just kick off a manual backup every so often (balanced risk).

Overall Review: The drive itself is great and fast. Just look elsewhere for your backup software or do it yourself.