| Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB External Hard Drive
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In Use:
As mentioned, the plastic band that travels down the middle of the device glows bright yellow when powered up. The photos may be a bit blurry, but they clearly shown the visual effect of the band, as well as the Seagate logo which also lights up. Although the software says that there should be, there is no indication of drive activity like many drives have, but just the constant yellow glow.
 
Software:
The Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB External Hard Drive comes with a custom package of utilities that couldn't be easier to install. All of the software is already loaded onto the drive, and when you connect to a Windows PC you get a prompt that asks if you would like to "Install FreeAgent Tools", as well as the typical options for external/optical devices such as copying pictures, open folder to view files, take no action, and so on.
The next series of images will walk through the basics of the software operation, taking a quick look at the major features. The screenshots below show that Seagate has developed a custom interface for the FreeAgent drive that not only looks good, but is quite functional and easy to navigate. Once installed, two icons are placed in the taskbar; one for the FreeAgent Tools and another for the Auto Backup software to be discussed later.
The below left image shows the "Your Drives" screen of the FreeAgent Tools, which really just functions as the start page for anything you would like to do. It identifies your drive(s) and some basic information about it, as well as providing links to the various other pages within the software package. The below right image shows the "System Rollback" screen where you can establish restore points for your system, and reload these old configurations should the need arise. You can handle this manually, but as a default the FreeAgent Tools are configured to create an automatic restore point every 24 hours.
 
The screen shown in the below left image is for the "Internet Drive". I initially assumed it was going to help me configure the FreeAgent Pro to be shared out over the Internet like some NAS enclosures allow. What it actually does is lead to you to a website where you can sign up for password protected space (below right image). Using a product key found in the manual qualifies you for a special offer of 500MB for 6 months free. A monthly or annual rate applies after that, and at $5.95/month for 1GB of space or $119.95/year for 5GB of space, in my opinion you are better off figuring something else out. Whether you find/buy software to share your drive from your broadband connection or pay for a basic web hosting package, you could do better.
 
The image below shows the "Utilities" screen which allows you to run drive diagnostics, adjust the sleep timer, and supposedly adjust the drive lights. Have you ever had a light switch in your house that just seemed to do nothing? Like the insurance commercial where the couple can't figure out the switch in their home which makes the neighbors garage door go up and down? Well, the adjust drive lights feature is now one of many switches in my house like that. While it did allow me to turn the lights on or off, the options on that page are actually "Display status and activity lights" or "Turn lights off". As I mentioned previously there is no activity light, at least on this sample, no matter how many times I flip the switch between settings.
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