Seagate Free Agent Pro Swap question

[matrix563]

i was thinking about getting a few 750gb seagate free agent drives. i know i can put the 750gb drives inside my pc, but my question is, can i put in my old 250gb and 400gb drives inside the free agent enclosure and have it work, without worrying about the enclosure formatting the contents?

i also heard someone say seagate firmware limited the free agent drives to be slower than regular 750gb drives you can get by themselves. is that true?

 

[rsgunter]

i was thinking about getting a few 750gb seagate free agent drives. i know i can put the 750gb drives inside my pc, but my question is, can i put in my old 250gb and 400gb drives inside the free agent enclosure and have it work, without worrying about the enclosure formatting the contents?

I'm in the same boat and yes I'm assuming you can just put whatever hard drive you want to in there with no issues. After all, it should be nothing more than a simple sata and power connector in there.

i also heard someone say seagate firmware limited the free agent drives to be slower than regular 750gb drives you can get by themselves. is that true?

I've heard that as well. I believe you can flash firmwares on drives though so probably shouldn't be a huge deal. I doubt they would make it horribly slow, at that price point it needs to have some speed.

I'm basically doing the same thing you are btw.

 

[xxEIEIOxx]

I have a FreeAgent Pro 500. It looks to be sealed pretty well, so I don't know how hard it would be to open one. I can tell you that they are slower than an internal drive by a good amount. I assume they sacrificed speed for sound, as it is absolutely silent. As far as firmware for hard drives, good luck finding any. There is an update that can be found for the FreeAgent Pro, but it is for the eSATA controller in it, not the actual disk drive. I have always heard they won't release hard drive firmware to the general public because they don't want to hear from customers that hosed their drives doing an update.

 

[rsgunter]

I have always heard they won't release hard drive firmware to the general public because they don't want to hear from customers that hosed their drives doing an update.

I figured as much.

I'll be curious to see the true transfer speeds. I figured a lot of it had to do with the drives having a heat problem in the enclosure so they slowed them down a bit. I dunno, we'll see.

I've seen a couple of threads on different forums explaining how to crack open the seagate casing and if done in the correct order it really isn't that bad.

 

[xxEIEIOxx]

The transfer rates I get average 30-35 Megs, as opposed to my internal, which gets about double that.