Heads up - April 17, 2010

I have to agree with the earlier post that this is overpriced, but I bought it anyhow, because I wanted the firewire speed, and I thought the little docking station would be handy. Well it was after I took a file to the firewire cable ends because they were so fat that they wouldn’t fit in the port on my macbook pro or any other Apple I tried.

After emails with photos and dial indicator measurements back and forth to Apple and Seagate, an Apple tech sent me this ” I have reviewed the pictures. I have asked multiple people to verify the information. We all agree, the cable has a different bevelled edge. I would contact Seagate regarding this matter and explain our situation. I cannot understand why they would deviate from the standard firewire 800 plug. ” Of course Seagate as expected wont fess up. I am wondering if I am the only person with this issue???? The cable might be able to be forced in but only by applying way more pressure than I was comfortable with, and perhaps more that the receiving end was designed to withstand.

After Seagate jerked me around, sent me to 3 different people each nicely explaining I should take the drive back to where I bought it, which I nicely explained was from their website, they asked me to send the dock and cables in for them to look at. I finally gave up just hoping they would have sent me new cables that fit. I took out a file, filed the width down to match the firewire cable I had and plugged it in. Works fine but come on, I paid $140 for this POC and then I had to modify it like THAT. The drive works fine, but the quality is pretty low. The idea of a plastic case that could build a static charge strikes me as pretty shortsighted. . . . we’ll see. My other drives I bought on ebay from Oyen_digital one 3 years ago and the second over a year ago. I thought I was saving a few bucks, but not with this drama.
Rating: 1 / 5

Michael S. Garvin - April 18, 2010

only problem I have is that I don’t have a fw800 jack on the back of my mac mini! But it does come with enough cables to make up for it.
Rating: 4 / 5

CityGal - April 18, 2010

Seagate FreeAgent Go Dock and Case 100521233 (Silver/White)
I happened to purchase this drive and dock bundled together by Seagate (along with a case too) from another vendor, but I wanted to share my experiences here with you. I have a MacBook Pro, Intel chip, purchased January 2008. It has both FireWire 400 & 800 as well as two USB 2. 0 ports. I wanted to replace my older, much physically larger Seagate backup drive with a portable drive and have been looking for a FireWire one that was reasonably priced. I was able to get this bundle for $109, a super deal. These Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac drives in Silver are a stunning accessory to your aluminum MacBooks. They are small, lightweight, and very portable

One of the great things is this drive is already set up for Macs, so there is no changing the drive format from Windows to Mac. I’d been using Time Machine (part of Mac OS X Leopard) to do backups on the old Seagate drive and wanted to move the backups from that drive to this one. There were very easy instructions to follow in the Apple Support Discussion forums on how to do this using Disk Utility. I was able to move it easily (though it did take quite a long time-just be patient). Because this drive can use FireWire 800, all future backups will be much faster than the USB connection I’d used with the old drive.

A few things to note:
1. this Mac formatted drive is available in several different GB sizes.
2. you can connect it in several different ways, and the various cables needed are packaged with the drive. The fastest way is to use FireWire 800. The drive itself can connect to your computer with any of the following, going from fastest to slowest:
A. FireWire 800
B. FireWire 400
C. USB 2. 0
If you wish to use the available dock, you must connect with FireWire 800 as the cable is hardwired to the dock, and the connector on the other end is only FireWire 800. I honestly don’t know if you could use an aftermarket adapter to change the connection to FireWire 400 (if that is all you have), so check with Seagate if that is of importance to you.

If you don’t use the dock, you can use the supplied cables to make any of the above mentioned connections. However, while the drive is powered through the FireWire cables, to use USB requires you to have TWO available USB ports as one port is used for the data transfer and one is used for the powersupply. The proper cables are supplied, but just know this will be a much slower data transfer than if you can use FireWire.

I then wanted to use my old Seagate external drive as a bootable disk, should disaster strike my Mac. It isn’t a simple process to create such a thing with Mac supplied software, but there are several freeware/shareware programs that are mentioned in the Apple Support Discussion group that are easily available online and once I’d downloaded one it was a snap to create the bootable disk.

I am thrilled with this purchase, and commend Seagate for making such an exceptional product. Oh, did I say it has a FIVE year warranty? Happy Backups!
Rating: 5 / 5