The difference between hard drives

[Mobile Freak]

Hi
I have been through many portable hard drives, specifically 2.5". Found myself buting a free agent seagate 640 gig yesterday. I asked the consultant what is free agent and he said: "It is faster"

I tested this last night and it is the same speed as my others. Who knows what free agent is?

Also, i was always baffled with this. Why when you purchase a hard drive, it says e.g. 640 gig but there is only 599 gig available?

 

[LancelotSA]

As far as I am aware it is all about the backup software and the bells and whistles that come with the drive. Someone from Seagate talks about it here :

http://www.podtech.net/home/1823/seagates-new-drive-line-free-agent-with-john-van-bronkhorst

Last year, Seagate bought Maxtor Corporation. All of a sudden we had two brands selling pretty much the same thing, gigabytes in a box with backup solutions. Maxtor had a really good brand presence in the marketplace, known as the backup data security and protection brand.

So, we are leaving it that way, so we’re using this opportunity today here at CES to launch a new brand strategy for Seagate, which is all about you. It’s about you and your creativity and the freedom to access your data and use your data anytime anywhere. So, we’ve brought up this entire new product line, it’s called Seagate Free Agent

The other thing that’s really important about this product announcement we have today, is that we’ve put a five year warranty on all of these products. It’s no longer that you get a one year warranty on an external storage device.

 

[Mobile Freak]

@ LancelotSA

Thank you for this. As always, this forum always answers my questions....

 

[Weasley]

the reason most drives is less than advertised is because windows see a kilobite as 1024 and the drives companys make a kB 1000 bites and for meg 1024*1024 against 1000*1000. so thats why drives are always less tha what they say

 

[psichron]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=free+agent+harddrive

FreeAgent is a brand, manufactured by Seagate, it's not a feature.
Also, it actually is 640gig, windows just reports it wrong.

 

[Mobile Freak]

So if i plug it into a linux or apple machine, i will see 640 gig?

 

[psichron]

I think linux also reports it incorrectly. Max OSX should report it correctly.

 

[PostmanPot]

Freeagent is just Seagate's brand of external hard drives. Says nothing about speed.

In any case, USB throughput will alwas limit HDDs' true speed.

 

[greg_SA]

Freeagent is just Seagate's brand of external hard drives. Says nothing about speed.

In any case, USB throughput will alwas limit HDDs' true speed.

Not always - many 2.5" drives can only do a continuous +/- 30MBytes per sec which is less than USB2 (480mbit/sec).

Even on SATA, we measured some internal 3.5" drives about 2 years ago and could only get around 40 Mbytes/sec.

 

[TheRift]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=free+agent+harddrive

FreeAgent is a brand, manufactured by Seagate, it's not a feature.
Also, it actually is 640gig, windows just reports it wrong.

Depends how you define a gig. That's the whole issue anyway.

 

[psichron]

The correct definition for a Gigabyte is 1 000 000 000 bytes and it is denoted with GB.

A Gibibyte is 1024*1024*1024 bytes and is denoted with GiB.

 

[RustyPrincess]

The FAT table takes up space on the drive, so you will have less storage space than is stated on the box.

 

[ponder]

Not always - many 2.5" drives can only do a continuous +/- 30MBytes per sec which is less than USB2 (480mbit/sec).

USB can not sustain data throughput at 480Mb/s anyway, it's way lower than that.

 

[TheRift]

480Mb/s is about 60MB/s. My flash drive pulls 30 on reads. I'm sure a decent hard drive will get more than that.