Seagate is renewing its range of 2.5 inch drives. We think the FreeAgent GB is now much nicer to look at. The casing is thinner, but is also more robust, thanks to the aluminium alloy underlined with a white slab of plastic. What’s more, you can choose between four colours: grey, blue, red and black. Seagate says that this is the ultimate in current portable storage solutions but it only has USB 2.0 for the PC version. We would have expected at least FireWire400 or even eSata.

A socket option

The constructor gives us the option of a socket with this external disk drive. Although this may not increase speeds it should make your link up with the computer easier. However it isn’t indispensable. And it does cost something.

Performances are down

As we have said, the design has changed, however read and write speeds show no improvement on the previous version. They even seem to be down. We managed to get an average of 23 MB/s for write speeds while the Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini is far ahead with 28 MB/s. It’s the same for read speeds. Maxtor has an advantage with an average of 33.4 MB/s against 27.6 MB/s for the Seagate.