Macworld Forums: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-Portable Drive 500GB - Macworld Forums

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IMHO, a completely flawed concept.

Compared to the superb Iomega eGo (with all the ports built in) and you can use your own existing cables etc.; you're lumbered with different "bricks" on this Seagate unit.

I can take the eGo anywhere to ANY machine, old or new (I can even connect it to a souped-up old G3-based mid-1990s PowerMac 7600 with a Firewire 400 card in it), or take it to another studio with MacPros who all have Firewire 800 etc. Firewire cables are dirt-cheap and I've a box of them already from the past 10 years.

$40 bucks for a proprietary adaptor (per port reqd) is absolutely outrageous.

I'll be sticking with the eGo's thanks

rpm?

get a grip...this hard drive is mainly for people that have both PC and Mac machines that they use on a daily basis and need them to work together

iomega drives are for those people that are like me that are Mac only of course you can reformat them...as they are usually formated mac

two totally different demographics...please read the article before passing judgement

Are there any USB 3.0 ExpressCards for MacBook Pro's yet?

Big question -- does anyone know if you install the paragon software on your Mac? It's expensive but I'd like to have it so I can read/write to other PC external drives.

for ntfs software try 3gntfs. been using it for years to use my bootcamp as a fully mountabe read/write drive: talk about easy pc troubleshooting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS-3G

NOW4REAL954, on 20 August 2010 - 06:18 AM, said:

I have read the article thoroughly, thanks for the lecture.

One of my Iomega eGOs is dual-formatted and (thanks to the built-in USB2) works great on PC as well as with either of the Firewire ports on the Macs.

The only consolation to this Seagate unit is it's ahead of the game and can be used on a brand new 2010 W7 PC with USB3 card.

Apart from that, it's *still* a flawed concept.

This post has been edited by DVA_Airwolf: 21 August 2010 - 02:20 PM

What about Firewire 3200?

Does it have more than one Firewire port so that I can daisy chain drives? Firewire 800 hubs are hard to find.

it is about time for apple to incorporate universal fil system support into OSX. MacFuse was step 0.5, now standard file systems such as NTFS, NTFS+, ZFS need to be read write enabled. If only so that bootcamp users and OS migrators can be accommodated.
My sister has just bought one of these drives and based on advice from an experienced mac user has reformatted the drive as Fat32, and almost certainly has lost access to the overpriced paragon software and created issues for her new backup system.
Had Apple been proactive and either bought out Paragon, or finished developing the open source alternatives my sister and others would have fully functional alternatives. More to the point Bootcamp would be able to be fully backed up and restored using Time Machine.
the moral is back kup your backup drive before you use or reformat it. and keep reminding Apple that keeping it simple for users includes facilitating access to drives formatted for other OSs such as XP and Vista and 7. The easier Apple makes it for migrators the more emigrants will buy Apple.

This is an excellent external hard drive ! I really love it's compact size, it really easy to use and the price was really fair (I got the 1TB version for just 130$ from http://amzn.to/9Vruwx ), I would recommend this to anyone.

Does anyone know whether or not you can open the enclosure and swap out the hard drive?