Digital Trends

Seagate FreeAgent Go January 17th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We connected the FreeAgent Pro to both our desktop and our notebook for testing. The FreeAgent software is on the drive itself, so you can install it on whatever computer you are using.

NSYNC

We first decided to make a sync folder of our music on both PCs, thinking that we could use the drive to sync both of them. As in, we could sync the “music” folder between the PC and notebook. As it t turns out, this was not the case and that’s not how the drive works. You tell the drive what you want to be sync’d, and it copies it to the drive. Then every time you connect the drive to that PC it will sync the contents on the drive with what is on your PC. All in all this works very well and we did not have any real problems, with one exception. 

The only control you have over the sync process is what to sync, and whether the sync will occur automatically, or manually. That’s it. So here’s what we found: if you delete a folder on your PC that is in the sync zone, plugging in the Seagate drive will restore the folder. If you delete a folder on the Seagate, and then re-attach the drive, it’ll restore that folder. This is obviously a pain in the butt, because what if you actually wanted to delete that folder? You have to delete it from both locations to make it permanent, which is lame. A simple option that says “if it’s deleted in source, delete in target” would be appreciated, or some way to prioritize the process.”

Ceedo

We’ve used Ceedo before, back in the day, and are happy to say it’s improved a lot since the last time we saw it. The sheer amount of programs you can put on it is incredible, and includes all the programs we use most such as Firefox, VLC media player, WinRar, Thunderbird, and a lot more. 

Even better, the process of adding new applications is extremely intuitive and worked flawlessly for us. You click the Ceedo button, then “add programs,” and a webpage opens listing the apps you can download by category. You click download, and it downloads and begins installing.

You can download a wide-range of free utilities, apps and games to keep on the FreeAgent.

Once installed, it shows up under “All Programs,” and Ceedo even puts a little shortcut to it on the bar so you can access them without clicking the Ceedo button. We think this software is fantastic, especially since it runs from the drive itself, so you can surf the net on a strange computer without worrying about leaving any incriminating evidence behind in the form of browser history or cookies.

The only downside is there’s an option to install programs you already have on your computer to the FreeAgent, but to do so you have to purchase a program named Argo, which cost $30 USD. Nothing like forking out money after the product is purchased.

We found that on our test unit the drive automatically put links to Microsoft Office in the Ceedo menu even though the applications were running from our hard drive, which is a cool feature.