Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra 1.5TB external drive review

The FreeAgent GoFlex is Seagate’s line of simple and compact portable external drives but the one we have here is slightly different. It’s a bit chunkier and heavier but it also packs a whopping 1.5TB of storage. Watch your friends’ jaws drop when you answer them how much storage it has.

1.5TB is the highest capacity Seagate has gone so far on this size and we’re looking at a couple of 750GB platters inside it that results to the added size and heft. What’s nice here is that your typical USB port (not USB hubs or USB ports from keyboards and accessories) can power this drive by itself so no need for a different cable for power.

The Seagate GoFlex Utra 1.5TB already supports USB 3.0 (also backwards compatible) although speed is slightly slower than your typical USB 3.0 drive. And just like the rest of the GoFlex family, the Ultra comes in two parts, the drive itself and the detachable SATA adapter for the USB cable that can be swapped with other tips that are sold separately, like FireWire or eSATA for instance.

You will be happy to learn that the drive is already pre-formatted to NTFS to remove that pesky 4GB file limitation. It also comes with a built-in driver to allow Mac users to read and write from it although you still need to format it to HFS+ if you want to use Time Machine on it. A Memeo Backup software is bundled with it but you’d rather opt for other third-party backup softwares unless you wish to pay more for the full functionality.

So what did we do with a portable hard drive? We went around asking friends to transfer all their HD videos into it. We weren’t able to test it with a USB 3.0 but on USB 2.0, average transfer speed is 27 MB/sec. for files around 1.5GB which took approximately 40 seconds to transfer.

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra 1.5TB is not a new product but it still carries almost Php9,000 price tag. It might be steep for some but you will be getting USB 3.0 and the option to use other connectors for different systems. If the price is still too much for you, the 1TB version will set you back around Php5,400.