ST315005FPA2E3-RK, xtreme storage

Overall Rating4.54.54.54.54.5

xtreme storage

Way better than the older freeagent external drive it replaced so far. It’s smaller and lighter and the software to turn off the drive light actually works in Vista x64 now. What I really like is how the light stays off even when the power is completely off until you switch it back on. Previously you had to turn off the light every single time.Runs quiet and cool. No stuttering or failures so far. Pros - more than 2x as much space as my older external. Included software way better than older freeagent drives and works in Vista x64. Cons - doesn’t come with esata cable so I wouldn’t know if esata problems are as bad as suggested. It does come with firewire and usb cables and I’m using the faster firewire and works great with that as I said. Included stand crud and not worth using. Choice of white contrasting power and connection cables poor. Only 1.36TB formatted:( and if you are using nvidia nforce chipset even less space will show up in Vista due to bug:
1.5TB (ST31500341AS) or larger SATA hard drive only showing 1.1TB capacity in Windows Vista
[...]
Backup program is still not that great and not intuitive at all. I tried using the encryption feature and it’s not worth using since it takes a long time to decrypt if you have thousands of files!

Don’t know why this 1.5TB drive from Seagate is so much reliable than their normal 1.5TB retail drives?
The other 1.5TB Seagate drive I have installed inside my PC is making terrible screeching sounds like it’s about to die anytime now :(

Update (2/3/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 1.5 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive ST315005FPA2E3-RK Black Electronics, was written by Jaime Moreno.

The average rating for this item is 4.7 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.

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Reviews (2)

Jaime Moreno

April 11th, 2010 at 7:44 pm    


Overall Rating44444

xtreme storage
Rated 4 stars.


A. Stidwell

May 10th, 2010 at 12:31 am    


Overall Rating55555

Great drive if nothing else
I will start off saying that I am a Mac user so I cannot speak as to how this drive operates in a Windoze environment. I only use this drive as a Time Machine back up and it works for that purpose. I have it hooked to a Mac mini using FireWire and it is fast, silent, and it works. To the one who said it does not work with Macs, it does, but I will say it does take a little bit of Mac know how to get it formatted. You have to first plug it up using USB to format a single Mac OS Extended partition in Disk Utility. Once you do that you can erase the entire drive and format it that way. A little bit of a run around but it will work just fine after that. All in all a great drive that does what you tell it to do.

The Good: It’s a drive and it works.
The Bad: If you are not familiar with formatting in OS X it can be a chore. Also you have to format it in USB before switching to another connector in OS X.
The Ugly: Some may not like the “breathing” light but I have no problems with it.


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