[vox-tech] Seagate FreeAgent 500GB review (for linux)

[Bill Broadley]

I ordered the FreeAgent 500GB for $99 ish during the big black Friday/Cyber 
weekend promotions.  Then of course came the bad news:

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9831568-16.html
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/07/seagate-freeagent-drives-not-down-with-linux/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/12/09/0651200.shtml

I was kinda bummed.

Turns out not only does it seem to work rather well, it seems much faster than 
I expected.  When I scp a 350 MB file from another machine onto said drive: 
                            100%  350MB                    29.2MB/s   00:12

Not sure if the bottleneck is scp (and it's encryption) or the drive, in any 
case I consider that pretty healthy for a usb connected drive.  As the news
above mentions I expected to transfer a bunch of data to it, then have it idle
out.  So I started a big transfer and went to bed.  Lo and behold the next 
morning it took a few seconds to spin up but I still got the above mentioned
performance.

My conclusion is that Ubuntu Gutsy i386 has some magic that the above 
mentioned articles don't know about.

In any case the drive "just works", is fast and is reasonably quiet (but not 
silent).  I'm pleased.