Design
Having recently completed testing on the new design refresh of the Seagate FreeAgent Go, we were pumped to receive another Seagate drive. After all, the Go was a great looking drive, and while we were cautious about anything that's labelled as "Xtreme" — on the not inconceivable grounds that they might also be "Rad", "To The Maxx" or, for that matter, "Totally Grody" — our hopes were high.
Then they were dashed, as soon as we opened the box. To put it bluntly, the so-called "Xtreme" FreeAgent looks like a router. And just in case anyone at Seagate thinks that's a compliment, you should bear in mind that, with only a few exceptions, most routers have been designed to fit into cupboards so that you don't have to look at them for any longer than is strictly necessary.
Like the new design of the FreeAgent Go, the Xtreme lights up in a pseudo star field pattern when it's powered up and properly connected. Being a larger physical drive, the star field is a little larger as well.
Features
The 1TB FreeAgent Xtreme features two FireWire 400 ports, one mini USB 2.0 port and an eSATA port, although cables are only provided for USB and FireWire connections. It's formatted out of the box in NTFS format. The Xtreme comes with a chunky AC adapter; while it would be possible to shift the Xtreme around, it's not really what we'd call "portable" in any real sense.
Like the new FreeAgent Go, the Xtreme ships with Seagate's Manager software on the drive, and by default, it'll try to install this the first time you connect the drive up. Seagate Manager provides utilities for handling backup, file synchronisation and file encryption, and as we discovered testing it on the same system as the FreeAgent Go, it's also happy to deal with multiple Seagate drives, although predictably it won't even look at any other brands. As a free offering it's workable enough, but an application that would consider other drives would be more flexible.
Performance
Transferring test files over USB, the Xtreme performed in the average range for a drive of this type, with write speeds around 28MBps, and read speeds of around 37.4MBps for our standard 76MB folder of files. Bear in mind that your choice of files (whether you're shifting single large files or folders of many files) and especially your operating system of choice — Vista for whatever reason is still horrible for file transfers, while XP and OS X tend to perform equally well — can affect your results. For the record, we tested under Windows XP Service Pack 3 with a 30-file folder weighing in at just over 76MB.
The Xtreme isn't just a USB 2.0 machine, however; it's also eSATA and FireWire 400 capable. It's in eSATA mode that the Xtreme does indeed fly, recording an average read/write speed of 58.4/69MBps under Windows XP with our test files. Again, your experience will vary depending on operating system and files used.
Just as with the Go, the Seagate Manager utilities are logically laid out, and as a bonus freebie with the drive (in essence) they're perfectly acceptable. We certainly can't suggest that people don't back up their precious documents. The Xtreme, being less portable than the Go, would be presumably less knock-prone and thus more likely to have a longer shelf life. We'd still suggest a multi-stage backup strategy, however.
If you're after a solid drive with some excellent speeds once you progress beyond USB, then the Xtreme is a good choice. Just don't expect it to be a particularly attractive drive.
